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Post by Cotham Marble on Jun 9, 2020 13:45:34 GMT
Wrens are a fairly common if irregular visitor to my garden, usually only evident from their angry chatter from the hedges and occasional singing, and rarely spending any time in the open. In one of those "what on earth is that about" moments that watching wildlife throws up, I'd just put out a load of washing on the line, when a wren appeared hanging off a tee shirt, it then proceeded to move from one item of clothing to another, going right inside tee shirts and other items. It was too soon for any quantity of insects to have gathered on the clothes, they,d only been out a few minutes, and after a long machine wash I'm not sure even my grubbiest gardening clothes would have held any food attractions. I also didn't see any threads or fabric nipped away although the bird did seem to be using it beak to explore the fabrics. In all this the bird spent nearly 3 minutes on it's explorations before zipping off.
Any suggestions about what was going on ? |
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Post by aeshna5 on Jun 9, 2020 16:00:12 GMT
Maybe it was looking for insects as it wouldn't have had any prior knowledge that there unlikely to be any there? The only other thing that crossed my mind could it have been getting moisture from the wet clothing as it's been largely dry for sometime (though we did finally get a downpour a couple of days back)?
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Post by accipiter on Jun 9, 2020 18:19:31 GMT
Maybe it was looking for insects as it wouldn't have had any prior knowledge that there unlikely to be any there? The only other thing that crossed my mind could it have been getting moisture from the wet clothing as it's been largely dry for sometime (though we did finally get a downpour a couple of days back)? I agree with Aeshna, notably the first explanation. Alan |
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Post by Cotham Marble on May 8, 2021 16:19:15 GMT
The value of repeated observation. Same behaviour this last week, except this time the Wren also took moss and dried grass from the ground in between its inspection of the washing - so I'm fairly convinced that on each occasion the bird was taking small fibres from the surface of the clothes, which I suppose are analogues of thistle/dandelion down and spiders' webs.
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