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Index of Subjects Possibly both but maybe neither, perhaps just using a more natural aptitude. HB feeder outlets are under hydrostatic pressure from the height of sugar water inside the feeder, and what stops this coming out of the ‘flower' holes and letting air bubbles in is presumably surface tension at the hole. If you inject a bit of extra energy into the system by accidentally tapping the feeder, an air bubble easily goes in and a drop comes out, at least it does on our two small feeders. One thing that woodpeckers are good at is intentionally tapping things quite hard, so that might be all it takes to get drops to pop out of the hole in the ‘flower’ for consumption. One of your downys may have learned to do this. An interesting question then is whether the WP has shown this to its offspring who then learned the trick. This goes back to the situation that started on the south of England in the 1940s or perhaps earlier, where blue tits (chickadee-like birds) learned to peck holes in the aluminum caps of milk bottles delivered routinely in the early morning by a ‘milkman' to the outside of each house, well before the advent of supermarket milk. This allowed the birds to sip the cream off the non-homo milk (it was countered by leaving an inverted empty baked bean can for a cooperative milkman, who placed it over the milk bottle to protect the cap). The interesting thing is that this practice by the birds spread north slowly year by year as a learned behaviour to encompass most or maybe all of the UK, transmitted socially from bird to bird. For this to have spread, the human countermeasures must have experienced a serious response lag, showing that birds are smarter than humans. Maybe there are other examples but this is the best known. Steve (Hfx) On Jul 26, 2015, at 5:59 PM, nancy dowd <nancypdowd@gmail.com> wrote: > A Downy Woodpecker visits my Hummingbird feeder many times each day. It obviously gets some of the sugar water by either lapping up spillover and/or inserting its tongue in the hole. I cannot tell which method it is using: > https://www.flickr.com/photos/92981528@N08/19845924340/in/dateposted-public/ > > After working awhile at the "flower", it tilts its head back seeming to chug at the liquid for ~10s: > https://www.flickr.com/photos/92981528@N08/19845925830/in/dateposted-public/ > > Anyone know if the Downy's tongue is actually small enough to gather the sugar water directly through the hole? Or is it being more of a cleanup crew and just squeegeeing up seep on the surface? Fun to watch in any case. (Excuse the photo quality- they were taken through a dirty window with an iPhone.) > > Nancy
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