World Peace….starting with robins

My love-affair with bird-tables started decades ago when I was living on the edge of Aberdeen, and arranged to collect compost from a supermarket, and henfood from a hotel’s waste food. It was great: I’ve never had such contented hens, or such a bulging compost heap. But the content of the bins that I was collecting was a bit unpredictable, mainly depending on which staff were on duty and how busy they were. Sometimes empty because everything had got chucked away in the rubbish bin, sometimes overflowing with cooked food if the hotel had overestimated the amount to cook of some dish which had turned out to be unpopular.  I started to wonder if we would soon be overrun with rats, because of storing pails of stuff like cooked tatties or porridge: but I was damned if I was going to take this (possibly) valuable resource to the council tip.

There was a bird-table in the front garden, and the birds sometimes got a share of any excess of scraps. Then I put up a second, and a third, bird tables: even if there was too much stuff for the birds to polish off (and still be able to fly), the height would keep the stuff out of the reach of mice and rats till the birds could finish it off.

Now I live far from the town, but I’ve kept up the tradition of having bird tables and hanging feeders. Though I don’t have such glorious excesses of tasty pickings, there’s always something to give the birds…sometimes I’ve helped to sweep out a silo in August when they’re getting ready for the new hairst coming in, and I’ve got a hundredweight or 2 of tired old barley to take away., or it’s not a lot of bother to give the tattie peelings a wee simmer on the back of the Rayburn, and put them out on the bird table in the morning. Anything really, but stopping short of actually buying proper wild-bird-food, that would go against my thrifty nature.  Where I live is quite high above sealevel, and surrounded mostly by forestry of spruce, and people started commenting on the number of birds in the garden, in contrast with the immediate surroundings. At some stage, I started to think about the side-effects of this gradual buildup of bird life, and I did a sum, Here’s what I worked out, (though admittedly I  just guessed most of the numbers, as it would take a serious ornithologist to come up with really hard facts about it…)

…………Say there are 100 birds that come regularly to my garden: and say that there would only be 20 of them eking out a thin life if I wasn’t feeding them at all. So 80 of them are there because of the feeding.
Wee birds have a fast metabolism, needing a continuous throughput of food just to keep alive. In the absence of any real facts, I guessed that a wee bird like a sparrow might weigh an ounce, and a blackbird might weigh 3 ounces. And with their fast metabolism, and their big surface area to keep warm compared to their small size, maybe they have to take in half their own body-weight per day in food (?) And most of that weight would pass through them…I know enough nutrition theory to work out that even though the nutrients have been digested on their way through the bird, the weight in is just-about equal to the weight out. If it wasn’t so, the bird would either be putting on weight, or wasting away. So that’s 40 ounces of manure a day that the birds are delivering. Seventeen pounds a week. Even if they roost outside the garden for 12 hours a day in the shelter of the forestry, still half of their production is being left in my garden- nearly quarter-of-a-ton per year. And it’s in a soluble form, spread over the garden ready to be rained into the ground, I don’t have to barrow it in the gate and spread it.

A few winters ago, somebody who’s interested in birds remarked that they’d never seen so many Robins so close together in one place…..they’re territorial creatures so usually they squabble, and the ones at the bottom of the pecking order have to keep moving on, and sneaking back in to the table when the baddest robin has its back turned. Here they were bickering a bit, but I suppose the forestry outside was so poor for food that they just had to change the hierarchy rules a bit. Over the next winter I took it on as a wee project to see just how far I could manipulate the situation. There are lots of feeders in the garden, and I added a variety of kinds: Ones that are completely open  so that a wee bird could land and grab a beakful and move on quick. Some right out in the open, some hidden away between bushes. Some that the bird goes right inside so they are easy to defend so that the bird who is already there eating has the advantage and they can concentrate on packing away the crumbs while only keeping half an eye out for another bird coming to muscle in. 
And from always being a bit careless about filling the feeders, I turned that into an art form, putting plenty in some of the feeders, and very little or none in others. And I kept on watching what would happen. Occasionally I saw the boss robin chase a weaker one away from a feeder, only to find that it was empty. Meanwhile, the one that had had to move along, had disappeared among the bushes: In true anthropomorphic fashion, I put myself into the boss robin’s thoughts: had it found a better feast than the poor pickings it had been chased away from? Was it worth following it to chase it away from the next place? For one winter only, I think the robins learned that it was more efficient to modify their territorial behaviour: it was better in the garden than outside. There was just about enough grub to go round, but it would be a full-time job to patrol such a variety of feeders to keep your own territory to yourself, and they gave up trying. After a number of frustrating times of leaving a good place to chase your rival off a worse place, they worked out it was better to count your blessings and stay put once you’d found a meal. There was still scope for masters and plebs, winners and not-so-winners: if you’re the toughest you could still commandeer the best. But there wasn’t much point in losing your hold on the best, to chase your rival away from the second-best. So, just for that few months that winter, they tried a live-and-let-live policy. Not to be best pals, just to reluctantly tolerate each other while the garden could supply enough, and it wasn’t worth the bother of wasting a lot of energy scrapping, better to eat then sit in the shelter of the spruce till you were hungry again and let the others get on with their own business.

Maybe with an example like this, the humans could learn the same idea: fighting is an inefficient way of getting what you want, you’re using up your own energy so even if you ‘win’ you’re still worse off than if everybody had just got on with their own business.