April 3, 2014
Gilded Flicker
Gilded Flicker

In a computer file labelled “Lifestyle” I cache my best action photographs of birds—birds doing stuff.  I keep flight shots in a different file, but really, although birds are constantly busy, they don’t do all that much--squabble, copulate, build nests, bathe; and eat.  These are the same five things we do except we also spend a lot of time working and playing.  Birds’ work, of course, is more directly related to food procurement than ours, and they spend so much time at working for food they don’t have what we consider leisure time for playing.  Ravens are the only species in the Lifestyle portfolio “playing,” and they’re notorious for it, perhaps because they may be the only ones that appear to be doing it.

In an email exchange with a friend after I wrote the January 9 column this year (jimburnsphotos.com/pages/1-9-14.html), the term “opportunistic feeder” was bandied about, but that term and “bird” itself seem synonymous to me.  It should be no surprise, then, that well over half of my action portfolio shows birds with food.  This got me to thinking about “opportunistic feeding” in a more literal sense—birds utilizing food sources provided by the “hand of man” as opposed to natural sources.  This sub-category of my portfolio, if there were one, would run from the obvious—hummingbirds on feeders and orioles on oranges—to the more circumlocutory.  I have an American Magpie on a road kill, a Crested Caracara on a hunter’s gut pile, and a Common Raven unzipping the saddlebags on a snowmobile in Yellowstone to get a package of beef jerky.  So, yeah, maybe ravens have leisure time because they’re smarter than your average bird.

Reflection on the “hand of man” in birds’ lifestyle certainly begs this question—are some species changing, which is to say evolving, because of our role in the environment?  And are they evolving in ways they wouldn’t if we were not involved?  The answers are indubitably affirmative.  If you’re an optimist, you’re hoping this has helped more species flourish than it has negatively impacted.  If you’re a pessimist, you know population growth and its attendant extraction industries are slamming our Earth Mother’s avian habitat at a faster rate than the birds can evolve.  If you’re on the fence and can’t decide, I hope you’re at least doing something for habitat and birds, even if it’s just in your own backyard.

Here is food for thought, pun intended.  Are the Gray Jays feasting on junk food in Yellowstone’s picnic areas still the same species as those in the boreal forests of Canada who have never encountered a human being?  Those latter Gray Jays are in trouble because, ahem . . . climate change, is causing their frozen food caches to thaw out earlier in milder north country winters.  So Gray Jays, as a species, may skate by on the hand of man, but are they really then the same species?  And, is this not where speciation begins?

What if the only avian species left were those most successful in evolving to coexist with us?  To meet our so-called “standards” as it were?  Then would we not be a different species too?  An “evolved” species with no genetic memory of, say Gray Jays in boreal wilderness, that long forgotten environmental milieu from which we sprang?  Is “evolution” necessarily a good thing or just an immensely incremental natural occurrence?  And how is “natural” defined?  Perhaps it depends on who is asking.  And I’m just asking.

Blue Jay
Blue Jay