Tag: instinct

The Western Kingbird and the Beetle

This will be another behavioral post – yes I am fascinated by interesting behaviors, perhaps overly so… I found this Western Kingbird hunting from a barbed wire perch which is quite typical for the species.  It was so focused on its prey that it let me get quite close so I was able to get better detail of the feeding behavior than I normally do.    1/500, f/8, ISO 400, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc  The kingbird has spotted prey on the ground      1/1250, f/8, ISO 400, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc  so it flew down to retrieve it.  In this case it happened to be a beetle.  You can see it clinging upside down to the darker diagonal twig just in front of the bird.      1/1250, f/8, ISO 400, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc  Here’s a highly cropped version of the previous image to show the beetle better.      1/1250, f/8, ISO 400, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc The bird grabbed the beetle but as you can see it had reached “through” the twig to get it      1/1250, f/8, ISO 400, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc so it got more than it bargained for.  The end of the twig broke off and wedged between the beetles abdomen and the upper mandible.      1/1000, f/8, ISO 400, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc So it flew back to its wire perch and tried to figure out what to do about the dilemma.  It actually spent about 15 seconds just sitting there and staring at what was in its…

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Loggerhead Shrike Impaling Prey, revisited

  Recently on this blog I posted images of a juvenile Loggerhead Shrike impaling a dragonfly on thorns and said I hoped to get more documentation of the behavior but it would likely have to wait until next years nesting season.  I was wrong.  I witnessed and photographed this behavior again just three days ago.  This time the shrike was also a juvenile but the prey was a large spider.    Juvenile shrike with spider What happened after the capture was interesting for me.  The bird didn’t simply impale the prey and leave it (as a cache or food store)  as might be expected of an adult.  Instead, it attempted to impale the spider on different thorns multiple times, like it was practicing – learning how to do it (keep in mind, the bird is a juvenile).  In fact, at one point the shrike even seemed to be “studying” its work, as you will see (I’m sure that’s anthropomorphic of me).  Sometimes they don’t actually impale the prey, instead they wedge it into crevices or between forked branches/twigs.  This shrike tried to do both with the spider.  After what I believe was four attempts at impaling/wedging the spider on some thorny branches someone had placed in a campground fire pit, the bird had apparently had enough practice and simply ate the prey in several pieces.   Some of the  images below aren’t of the best quality but I think they do document what I saw.  As far as I could tell, the spider was dead through this whole process.    Attempting to impale…

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