Thursday, August 29, 2013

Unlovable

There are few birds more obnoxious to me than Brown Headed Cowbirds.  Why? Not because I see them much: those in our area are not frequenters of the feeders.  Not because they are aggressive at feeders, or because they are unattractive.  No, because they are brood parasites.  And it riles me to no end these interlopers bring forth young who kill the often weaker young of other species.  And it is the neotropical migrants whose evolution has not caught up to the relatively late arrival of the cowbirds.  So we have an ugly situation where the cowbirds, acting from millennia of biological programming are wreaking havoc on already stressed species.  I understand that they're being themselves.  But cowbirds? I can't love them.

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