Unique Foraging Techniques You’ve Never Heard Of

They say the early bird gets the worm, but that’s not the only way birds catch their meals! Have you ever heard of birds about stealing from spiders? What about stomping their prey into the ground? Read on to find out more.

One wonderful facet of the adaptability of birds is the wide variety in foraging techniques that birds have adapted over time. You’ve probably seen with your own eyes how some birds like cardinals and chickadees will crack open seeds in your backyard feeders with their terete bills, or maybe you’ve had hummingbirds sip from your nectar feeders with their long, thin bills, lapping up the sugary water with their proboscis-like tongues. Perhaps at a park, you’ve caught sight of ducks tipping up to dabble or completely diving beneath the surface in search of aquatic vegetation. What about hearing the drilling of a woodpecker as it probes the tree bark for insects? In birding, this is all just the tip of the iceberg. Just as having many different ways to find food helps birds adapt to many environments, living in many different environments around the world has put pressure on birds to learn unique ways to feed themselves.

In nature, the form of an animal is strongly tied to its function. Broadly speaking, the air-foil shape of many birds’ wings allow for flight just as the wings of an aircraft and the placement of eyes on the sides of the head of many prey animals allows them to have a wider field of view. This is essential for spotting the sudden, swift movements of their hunters to escape in time. For foraging, the shape of a bird’s bill or legs are often crucial to the way they find food.

For example, Black Skimmers are known for having a significantly longer lower bill than their upper one. This rare characteristic is used to perform their namesake: skimming across the surface of water. Black Skimmers hunt for small fish and crustaceans just under the water’s surface by gliding low over the coast or over large lakes, dropping their lower bill into the water. When they feel the sensation of a fish, they snap their jaws closed, snatching their prey out of the water.

Another unique fishing technique employed by birds is the plunge-diving of Brown Pelicans. These birds are known to drop into the water from the air, wings partially folded, lunging at fish to stun them with the impact of the dive. The incapacitated fish are then scooped up with the bird’s massive bill, held in their fleshy neck pouch until the excess water is drained out the sides, and swallowed whole.

Oxpeckers use their specialized, laterally flattened bills to make the most of their interesting relationship with certain mammals. Many large mammals are subject to parasitic invertebrates such as ticks, botfly larvae, and many small insects. Oxpeckers are known to perch on these mammals like buffalo or zebras to forage on these parasites, picking them out of the hosts’ coats with their specially shaped bills. It is not clear how significantly this benefits the host, if at all, but it is certainly a unique—and gruesome—method for a bird to find food.

Among birds of prey like hawks, vultures, and other accipiters, the Secretarybird is truly one of a kind—It has been taxonomically categorized in its own family Sagittariidae. Most of the bird’s body resembles an eagle, but it has long, tall legs like a heron or crane. These legs are surprisingly strong, capable of exerting up to five times its weight in force in a swift stomp. This stomping is their primary method of hunting and killing their prey, usually snakes or lizards and some small mammals.

Other birds have a different advantage: intelligence and problem solving. If your own body cannot perform the task, make a tool to do it for you. For instance, Wild New Caledonian crows are known to poke sticks at insects in hard-to-reach places like tree holes or within tree bark, waiting for their prey to grab hold of the stick before “fishing” them out. Some are known to even modify twigs by removing leaves or twisting the end into a hook to get at more tricky angles. The Woodpecker Finch of the Galapagos Islands is known for using cactus spines to either encourage an insect to move out of an inaccessible space underneath some tree bark, to impale it and retrieve it, or to push it to a more accessible space. Herons have even been seen taking bread from humans to lure fish closer in the water while hunting. In the case of shrikes, who use thorns, tree spines, or barbed wire to impale and store their extra prey items for future meals like a pantry, the tool is not necessarily used for the act of foraging, but takes advantage of abundance to plan for a future scarcity. For a long time, tool creation and use were skills only attributed to humans, but this anthropocentric idea has clearly since been disproven.

Some birds are the type to untangle a knot by cutting through it. Crows have long been known to be intelligent and creative problem-solvers, but some populations have been known to leave walnuts in crosswalks or intersections to be run over by cars, waiting for the traffic light to turn red before safely retrieving the nuts now freed from their shells. If they’re willing to invest the energy, some will simply carry the walnuts as they fly high above some asphalt and drop them, letting the force of gravity take care of opening the shells upon impact. Gulls are known to do the same behavior with clams or mussels, flying over rocks to drop the mollusks to their doom.

Other birds will opportunistically find their food second-hand. For example, hummingbirds have been observed plucking insects caught in spiderwebs—a nutritious meal immobilized and practically gift-wrapped for the bird, who had contributed zero percent to the work of setting the trap. Less elegantly, Brewer’s Blackbirds have been seen picking dead insects splatted onto the grills of vehicles in parking lots. Well, that’s one way to take advantage of urbanization!

Clearly, the simplistic idea of a bird getting a worm could never come close to doing justice all the interesting and smart ways that birds feed themselves. While many have adapted specialized body features to forage most efficiently, others have picked up the skills to use and even create tools to augment their physical abilities. Perhaps most interestingly, a handful of birds have taken to more anthropogenically-assisted methods, taking advantage of the prevalence of cars and manmade infrastructural elements like barbed wire and asphalt.

What was the most surprising foraging technique in this post for you? Which is your favorite? Let us know through our contact page and keep coming back to learn something new about birds!