Already spoken for. Katie

I agree, this thread is getting long. Not so much in the number of responses, more the number of pictures. I'll start a new thread but first... Claire, I have noticed that my House Finch numbers are also way down. I had one day last week that I did not see a single HF. That is very strange. My Goldfinch numbers have also been down but not as much as the HF. I think part of the suet issue in my yard could be the feeders. The birds love the one that is attached directly to the tree. I could put anything in it and the birds would love it. I think they like it because it is easy for them to get to. They can hold on to the feeder or the tree. The larger birds like, Red-bellied, Flicker, Harry can all get a good grip and, it does not move. The other suet feeder that I have is smaller, cage style, the size of a single cake of mixed suet and is free hanging from a chain. I see smaller birds like Red Breasted Nuthatch and Chickadees at it but nothing larger. OK...now I'll start a new thread... sooey

my feeder is identical but is from songbird esentials. the orioles and tanagers and grosbeaks still use the lid on a platform first but if it is empty or busy they use the jar feeder. this time of year i have enough birds that they are busy on both feeders. grape is by far the favorite but they do eat apricot or berry or strawberry jams also.

Thanks, Jane, for the references. I found the sites: Carl Strang's June 2009 entry and Stanford group essay on Cowbirds. I'm a little skeptical about Strang's statement on instinctual behavior - it may be true but it sounds more like a belief not based on any science. (Just a quibble on my part - if he'd said the juvenile cowbirds 'appear' to seek out other cowbirds, based on his observations, I wouldn't have been annoyed - but ascribing the behavior to 'instinct' is a jump too far). A very interesting fact in the Stanford essay is that only about 3 percent of cowbird eggs actually result in adults! That's major mortality. The cowbird female just keeps laying eggs and eggs and eggs ... "An average female lays about 80 eggs, 40 per year for two years. About 3 percent of those 80 eggs end up as adults -- an average of 2.4 adults per female. Clearly, such numbers more than compensate for the excessive loss of eggs and young in the nests of inappropriate hosts." I wonder how the current situation differs from the earlier situation when the cowbirds evolved to follow the bison herds and couldn't hang around to set up a proper nest without dropping behind and struggling to find food for themselves and the young. That behavior probably was dependent on the migration patterns of the bison, but nowadays the cowbirds have the luxury of being able to stay in the same area as their young, even if they don't get involved in the raising of them. As far as which came first, the parasitic behavior or the adaptation to it, I would think that the ability to lay so many eggs and the rapid maturation of the young would come early. There's an interesting entry in the Birds of North America Online site (subscription only) saying that "Most fledgling losses occurred 1 or 2 d after leaving nest". There are a lot of unknowns here, but it's an interesting topic for study. I'm glad I don't have to do the research myself, it would drive me crazy trying to pull together all of the variables. Claire