doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com OT animal & bird language.

Many people think that animals & birds just make noises & have no real language.
As a pet owner & hunter for many years my experience has shown me that they do have language & certain parts of each species language is understood by all other species. Alarm calls are one instance.

Many, many times my presence has been betrayed to the whole countryside by a high flying crow. He staggers his wing beat & gives a lazy but very penetrating long drawn out call at which all the grazing cattle look up from feeding. Not only do they look up, but in my direction. That attitude then alerts every other creature to the direction of the threat. I have not been scented.
If I stay concealed & do not move until the cattle settle & start grazing once again I can get away with it.
Other times depending on what the crow has told them the cattle will come together & move off right out of it. Now the whole field is empty.

The butcher bird is a mimic & very vocal. They use the call to food of other birds to lure that species in for a kill. They also have calls that alarm for different things that they see. I have lived with & observed & hunted around these birds for a long enough time to understand the different calls. They know this too & will come to the house calling over the same thing again & again & I know that it is a cat that is bothering them because I have experienced the call to cat so many times. I grab a gun, get the cat & they are happy. Next time a cat is bothering them they come & tell me.
The call for a goshawk is different & more intense & the snake warning is different again.

In the field a hunters chances are better by understanding the messaging going on all around them.
Sometimes the message is to go home , leave the area because your cover is completely blown.

Do you listen to the chatter & understand it.

O.M

Every time I hear a gray squirrel scolding, I expect a buck to walk up. Sometimes one will...Geo

Chickadee's have a complex language comprised of the number of "dee's" they repeat.

Chicka-dee vs chicka dee dee dee
Up to 7 dee's I read.

I know that ruffed grouse and chickadee's territory's overlap, so, when I encounter a chickadee announcing my presence, I am likely to find a grouse nearby.

They are like the early warning system of the young forest.

That is pretty interesting. I'm from England, is a butcher bird the same as a grey shrike? I have , I think, heard that name applied.
I hope you don't shoot the goshawks like you do the cats, hope they are not the neighbors moggies .
You can learn an awful lot by studying to be still & quiet in the woods alright, if you can figure it out.
cheers
franc

Franc, I believe it is called a Loggerhead Strike. The like to impale insects small birds, lizards etc. on thorns and come back to eat them.

Shrike.
https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/searc...amp;action=view

JR

Not to worry Frank. I live right out in cattle country in Qld Australia and the cats are feral. A real problem in this country.
GoshawKS are protected by law with heavy fines for killing them.
I can fire a 308 Win off my front porch without anyone flinching or worrying about it.
The butcher bird I refer to is the Australian Pied butcher bird. A black and white bird.

moses and I live in the same kind of country, though half the circumference of the world apart. I can shoot off the back porch and pee off the front, without concern.

Good answer, moses, concerning the goshawks (read Cooper's hawks, Sharp-shinned hawks, etc. here ................protected by law).

Shrikes also impale insects and small reptiles on barbed wire fences, convenient "thorns".

SRH

The feller was talking about birds George....

Was it a flying squirrel ?

Many of the old time grouse hunters who wrote--right down to George Bird Evans--had a very negative opinion of goshawks. Growing up a pheasant hunter, my major concern was much more in the direction of the nest predators (raccoons being the worst because there are so many of them, followed by skunks and opossums) which pose the most significant threat to ground-nesting birds in farm country. They'll destroy nests, wiping out an entire clutch. A hen pheasant will renest, but each successive clutch is smaller.

If we'd had the same kind of trapping pressure on coons after CRP started as we did before--and it had declined significantly because fur prices had dropped and because there were not as many farm families with boys who ran trap lines for spending money--I can't imagine what that would have done to pheasant and quail numbers. They increased significantly under CRP, but would have increased even more if trappers had been as active as they were previously. And fewer predators would be even more welcome today, with the decline in CRP acres and in pheasant populations.