Bird Watching: Question about cardinals ..., 1 by beckygardener

beckygardener wrote:
I have a large family of cardinals that live near my yard that frequent my yard all day long. I have had the good fortune of watching a mother bird teach her babies to eat seeds right at my feeder. I've watched them play (chase each other around my yard flying from tree to bush to plants), eat, and drink in my yard. I've observed them for years, but I saw a behavior this morning that I have never seen ...

I have a Cape Honeysuckle growing (in tree form) in the corner of my backyard. It is a favorite of the hummingbirds and the bees when in bloom. It is currently blooming and will continue to bloom off and on from Fall to early Spring. It blooms right through the winter here unless it gets killed back by an unusually cold (freezing) winter weather. That happened last year here in Florida, so the tree isn't as big as it was, but ... it is still growing and producing lots of blooms.

Here is the behavior I observed this morning. I watched a couple of cardinals pulling the blooms off the CH tree one at a time At first I thought maybe they were eating bugs in the blooms or were just bored or playing. But the longer I watched them, the more convinced I am that they were eating the nectar in the blooms. They would pull the bloom off from the base and seemed to manipulate the blooms with their beaks and appeared to be using their tongues to lick the base of each bloom. They would hop from branch to branch going after each bloom cluster.

Now the negative thing about this is that the hummers and bees also enjoy the nectar. The cardinals are actually removing the blooms from the tree, therefore destroying a good nectar source for other creatures. I tried to shoo the cardinals away! I am sure they were laughing at me, because they are not afraid of me. (I've been feeding them seeds for years!) They came right back to the tree the minute I walked away! LOL! And there are 2 in the tree right now pulling more blooms off once again. At this rate, the tree will be striped of blooms by the end of the day! Grrrrr ...

If it wasn't such a good nectar source for the hummingbirds, I wouldn't even worry about it. But the hummers also love those blooms. I do have hummingbird feeders up, but the hummers always go for the blooms in my yard first and then the feeders. I've never seen this behavior from the cardinals before. My tree was always loaded with blooms in previous years, but this year I noticed it was sparsely blooming and now I know why! Ha!

Is this a common behavior of cardinals? Is there a reason that the birds are doing that? Are they fattening up for another cold winter here in Florida? I am really curious! I have never seen seed-eating birds do that before!

This message was edited Oct 23, 2010 3:41 PM