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From: Steve Deger <steved@scisoc.org>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
Subject: Astounding Avian Anomolies (sort of)
Date: 16 May 1996 16:12:18 GMT

Not sure if these have been discussed before, or if they really fall into this "avaian anomolies" category, but here goes:

F: There's no such thing as a snipe.

A well-known practical joke involves a group of people taking an neophyte into the woods at night on a "snipe hunt". The initiate is told to lay in wait with a gunnysack to try to catch a snipe. After a few hours, the poor sap finally realizes he's been hoodwinked--his "friends" have abondoned him in the woods, and there's really "no such thing as a snipe".

But snipe ARE real birds. The Common Snipe (aka Wilson's Snipe) was previously a popular game bird during the marketing hunting days of the 1800's. But after a sudden plummet in the population, the season was closed, and remained closed for app. 50 years. When it finally reopened, an entire generation of hunters had missed out on the tradition, instead turning their attention to larger gamebirds such as ducks, pheasants, grouse, etc. Snipe hunting never again became popular, although most states still have a fall hunting season for this marsh bird.

Fb: You need to take bird feeders down in the autumn, otherwise birds will "forget to migrate" and will freeze to death when winter comes.

The migration instinct has been programmed into birds throughout their evolution. It is unlikely that the presence of a single feeder is going to disrupt this powerful biological drive!

There ARE documented cases of migrant birds lingering at feeders and eventually freezing to death. But it is unlikely that these birds "forgot to migrate" simply because of the presence of the feeder. More likely, there was something physiologically wrong with them. Of the handful of late (November/December) hummingbird sightings reported to the Minnesota Ornithologists Union, a disproportionately large number have been of species that do not breed in the state. One of the most recent was a Calliope Hummingbird, a species indigenous to the Western U.S. The fact that such a bird showed up at ALL in Minnesota, let alone at such a frigid time of year, suggests that there was something wrong with its "migrational compass". If anything, the feeder helped the bird add a few days to its life before it finally succumbed to the cold.