We had a snow storm approaching Minnesota last weekend and the day before I headed over to the bird feeders at Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge to see if they were getting any Pine Siskins or Common Redpolls (surprisingly, no).
The feeders were incredibly active which is to be expected before a snow storm. I do enjoy watching a really active bird feeder with dozens of Black-capped Chickadees zipping to and fro, Northern Cardinals dotting the surrounding shrubs awaiting their approach and woodpeckers of all shapes and sizes jockeying for position on a skinny suet feeder. The rush hour like rush is comforting to me and has been since I was a kid. I could stare at it for hours.
Even though I wasn’t getting any of that hot winter finch action, I like to keep my digiscoping skills sharp and practiced on the finches. Then I noticed this House Finch has his eye on something and quit moving. I glanced around at the other finches…
This American Goldfinch almost cracked me up, it was frozen in mid bite on a black-oil sunflower. I even got video of the birds and you can clearly see this bird not moving, seed wedged firmly into place. I knew there had to be a hawk around somewhere, nothing else will make birds freeze like this.
After getting some video, I scanned the trees.
Sure enough I found an immature Sharp-shinned Hawk, the bird could see movement in the windows and flushed even though I was inside and it was high up in a tree outside. Incidentally, the above bird is an immature sharp-shinned that I digiscoped last winter in the exact same spot, but is not the the bird that caused all the finches to freeze in the video.
Accipiters like sharpies and Cooper’s Hawks are very ADHD in their behavior and when they see movement, they go for it. I think smaller birds learn this over time and experienced birds freeze at the feeders and keep an eye on the hawk to prevent being eaten.
Also, for those who enjoy digiscoping, all of the images and video in this post were taken using my Swarovski spotting scope and iPhone.
We were there on Sunday. I have never seen as many RTHA as I did in the short time we were there. Also, two RTHA have built a nest roughly 100 yards away from the feeders in our back yard. No idea if this is going to slow things down. A house sparrow seems to be too much work for too little a payout for a huntgry hawk though.