Jay - odd couple

I may have mentioned this before, but as a young boy I kept members of the corvid family, plus we bred budgies, canaries, zebra finches, love birds, cockatiels white crested laughing thrushes, pigeons, and fantail doves which were all allowed to fly free, mixing and eating with the wild birds of the neighbourhood. But I must admit I never saw any problems as far as mobbing or temperamental behaviour goes from the local birds.


Note


Allowing “all cadge bird species” to fly free is not usually done if they are not imprinted, and even then this is still a most unusual if not a unique practise. I say this has I have never heard of anyone else carrying out this practise certainly not these days anyway.


Neither did my tame magpie, jay, jackdaw, carrion crow chase other birds in order to kill them which is something they do in the wild, probably because they were all well fed and imprinted and therefore saw me as parent figure.


Mobbing normally occurs when one bird sees another as a threat to its eggs, young, competition from suitable nesting habitat and food source, I say normally because I have known instances where predatory birds of different species will still nest close together and tolerate each other, sometimes even in the very same tree or nesting box. Of course there is a rule of thumb where certain known aggressive species will not nest close together or in the same wood as in the case of the tawny owl, although having said that I have known instances where this has not been the case, in other words bird behaviour is not set in stone.


Also the size of the bird is not necessarily relevant either for instance Sparrowhawks will often see off buzzards in its territory, but still may end up nesting quite close to each other as the kestrel will sometimes do in rookeries.


Or you may have an instance as in my first paragraph where semi tame garden birds (those that are fed from feeders) are confronted with an escaped cage bird but see it as no threat. And so it is normally totally wild birds that see cage birds as a threat in some way but not always. And so one could say mobbing behaviour can be varied just the same as any other bird behaviour.


But equally some species of imprinted birds / individuals can be very aggressive as opposed to very friendly as imprinted carrion crows normally are, and so one could say that individual birds / species are a bit like humans in varied temperament (depending on the situation.)

Funnily enough I even knew of an imprinted female Sparrowhawk selected for its placid temperament live quite happily together with an imprinted woodpigeon.


Foot note


When my rook (which got on very well with Charlie my carrion crow) finely departed from this world Charlie commenced to eat the recently deceased so one could say he temporally reverted back to its base instincts (that part of its psyche) e.g. a wild bird, (psychopathic behaviour for a human) but not this bird, hmm very deep indeed. 

Alan, come into my parlour said the spider to the fly