Late summer and autumn are prime seasons for songbirds to pounce.
When confronted with predators, songbirds have more than just their fast and furious flight to protect themselves. Many perform a technique called, where large numbers of song birds aggressively gather around a bird of prey and rapidly fly while vocalizing loudly.
“The proportion of small birds relative to small mammals in the diet of the northern pygmy owl almost doubles from spring to summer, making birds the primary food source in summer,” said co-author and OSU graduate student Madeleine Scott,. “This is presumably because of the increasing availability of fledged offspring birds.”
Mobbing was observed in 8.1 percent of all trials. It peaked during the late summer and autumn when northern pygmy owls prey on young birds, when mobbing was behaved in 23 percent of the study’s trials. Of the 24 species of songbirds engaged in mobbing, chickadees were the most frequent mobbers, followed by red-breasted nuthatches, Pacific wrens, and dark-eyed juncos. These small species are all on the owl’s dinner menu.On average, 12.8 songbirds flocked nearby the speaker when the owl calls were played back, and the likelihood of birds mobbing increased as this number became greater.
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Frontiers | Mobbing behavior of songbirds in response to calls of an ambush-predator, the Northern Pygmy-OwlMobbing is a widespread but risky behavior where prey actually approach and may even attack their predators. Small songbirds gather in multi-species flocks to direct mobbing at birds of prey such as the Northern Pygmy-Owl (Glaucidium gnoma), a small diurnal species of owl in mountainous western North America. We hypothesized that intensity of mobbing behavior would vary according to risk to songbirds and that risk varied seasonally and across elevations. In particular, we expected mobbing intensity to change seasonally as a function of two primary sources of risk: seasonal dietary changes of pygmy-owls and distribution of pygmy-owls as a function of elevation. Pygmy-owls are known to shift their diet from mostly mammals in early spring to birds in early summer, so we hypothesized risk of predation would vary in parallel. Likewise, risk was expected to vary as the distributions of pygmy-owls were thought to vary seasonally across elevations. To elicit mobbing in a controlled manner, we conducted owl call playback experiments in the Oregon Coast Range mountains, USA. Overall, we found mobbing to be rare, observing it in 8.1% of 663 experiments. The frequency of mobbing did not appear to vary across elevations. Instead, mobbing varied mostly by season. The frequency of mobbing was highest during fall at lower elevations. Mobbing was rarest (1.3% of trials) during winter. Mobbing occurred during seasons when pygmy-owls tend to consume more birds, consistent with the hypothesis that seasonal variation in risk influences mobbing. In our study, mobbing happened when risk was higher. However, the increased risk may be offset by the influence of mobbing group size. Mobbing was more likely to occur at sites where the number of songbirds, especially chickadees (Poecile sp.) and nuthatches (Sitta sp.), was larger. Yet, even when songbird numbers were high, mobbing was rare during winter, suggesting an interaction between risk and energetic costs of mobbing. Additional experimen
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