I watched two drake Goosanders as they dived for food today. As soon as one dived, the other followed suit and they did this repeatedly, it was lovely to watch. Here is a distant clip.
I then remembered a line of five fishing female Goosanders last year in a Swiss lake, swimming and diving in an orderly line along the shallows. They were behaving as if they were fishing cooperatively: by rounding up fish they would increase each of the individuals success rate. This cooperative fishing has also been observed in Cormorants and in the close relative of the Goosander, the Red-breasted Merganser.
The five female Goosanders fishing in a line, the individual at the far end peers under the water.
More information
Des Lauriers, J. R., & Brattstrom, B. H. (1965) Cooperative feeding behavior in Red-breasted Mergansers. The Auk, 639-639.
Yesterday, the pond at my local park was almost completely iced over. While the ducks and geese kept to a small ice-free patch, the gulls seem to like walking on ice. A few young Common Gulls were about. One of them, a second winter bird, was carrying and handling (or should I say 'billing'?) a piece of moss. She would drop it, pick it up, shake it. She was being followed at close range by another two younger first winter common gulls. The first one eventually dropped the moss and one of the younger gulls swiftly picked it up and carried it for a while, in a repetition of the sequence. Then this gull found a short stick and she pecked it and picked it up repeatedly. I was pleased to get this sequence in video.
I have anecdotally documented play in gulls since Ralph Hancock drew my attention to this behaviour in his blog. Play has been described in gulls before, but only solitary play. But, was the behaviour I watched social object play? According to Judy Diamond and Alan Bond, in a review on social play in birds (where gulls are not mentioned) state:
'Social object play occurs
when two or more individuals engage in repeated interaction with
one or more inanimate objects in the environment without subsequent
consummatory behavior. The best evidence of social object play is provided
by contests over items that cannot be otherwise turned to useful
purposes. Role reversals are common in social object play, and the interaction
often ends with the contested item simply being discarded.'
I believe that the sequence I watched fits this description quite well. The gulls respond to one another in which the 'carrier' changes direction to avoid the 'chaser' and the chaser follows the carrier paying attention to what it does and is quick to retrieve the object when dropped. The interaction ends when the item is discarded. The interest in the moss by the second individual is affected by the carriers interest in it, like the object is given a new meaning as a 'toy'. Much evidence on social play in birds is anecdotal, which a few exceptions, notably in Keas and Ravens. However, given how social gulls are, and how opportunistic, with much adult behaviour involving stealing food items from each other, it appears surprising social play hasn't described in gulls. Possibly casual watchers of distant gulls assume food objects being the centre of attention instead of inedible 'toys'. The park's wintering flock is well used to people and allow close approximation, so it is easy to check what the gulls are handling. I should definitely pay more attention in the future to potential play sequences.
For more posts at The Rattling Crow on play in birds click here.
Warblers are generally migrant birds and we tend to associate them with warm weather and their songs heralding spring as males settle territories. One of the exceptions is the Blackcap, which I have covered before in the blog, which in the last half a century, has become a regular winter warbler in the UK, with some birds breeding in Germany migrating west to the UK, where they enjoy the food provided in garden feeders and milder temperatures. The other is the Chiffchaff is also a wintering warbler. Although not common, it winters around the coast and estuaries, especially in the South, and also industrial or sewage treatment sites where warm water encourages insects. In contrast to the Blackcap, The Chiffchaff is fully insectivorous through the winter so it doesn't benefit from berries or garden feeders. In the first day of the year I spotted a small bird in the garden and thought it would be a Goldcrest. Its relatively sedated moves (for a Goldcrest!) prompted me to look harder and I saw it was a Chiffchaff. A couple of days ago the bird, presumably the same one, was back I managed the top shot through glass, as it fed on the apple tree, where I've seen it several times. Some of the apple tree branches have an infestation of Woolly Apple Aphids, and this appears to be what the Chiffchaff is eating (you can see some fluffy colonies under the branch that the bird is sitting, to the left).
Friday, 13 January 2017
A lucky front shot of a male Mute Swan on a local park. He was with his polish variety partner, and ringed and approached me as I walked around the lake.
