Hi everyone
The sapsucker at my house eats the little pear berries from the Bradford pear trees.
I also had European starlings (10) for the first time this fall and this morning (3) grackle for the first time. As most of you know last year I had a huge number of grackles, starlings, redwing black birds and of course the one yellow headed blackbird. Funny how things change.
The pine siskins and purple finches were here for my birthday 11/16 but haven't seen them since. They had been here for weeks.
Happy Birding to all
Patricia Viola Rose
240-256-5423 cell
Callaway, St Mary's County
On Nov 28, 2012, at 11:32 AM, James Tyler Bell <jtylerbell...> wrote:
>
> We have a large persimmon tree next to our lab building here in Edgewater. Perhaps the same Yellow-bellied Sapsucker likes to hang around the tree in the winter. Today, I noticed the sapsucker up in the very top of the tree eating a persimmon. I've always seen them tapping wells in trees then attending them later but never seen this particular behavior before. Has anyone seen this?
>
> Birds of North America online has this about their diet but nothing specific about fruit species consumed:
>
> Major Food Items
> Sap (from variety of perennial plant species), insects, also bast (inner bark [cork cambium, phloem] and cambium layers), fruit, and seeds (Beal 1911).
>
> Quantitative Analysis
> Based on analysis of 313 stomach contents (including some Red-naped Sapsuckers; Beal 1911), 50.7% plant matter and 49.3% animal matter; of plant material, 28.1% of total food matter fruit (71.3% of diet in Nov), 16.5% cambium, and 6.1% miscellaneous plant parts; of animal matter, 34.3% of total food matter ants (Formicidae; 68% for May�Aug), 6.0% beetles (Coleoptera), 5.4% spiders (Araneida) and miscellaneous insects (mayflies [Ephemeroptera]; stoneflies [Plecoptera]; grasshoppers, crickets and tree hoppers [Orthoptera]; caterpillars and moths [Lepidoptera]; and flies [Diptera]), 2.6% wasps (Hymenoptera), and <1% true bugs (Hemiptera). Diet appears to shift according to time of year (see Food selection and storage, below). Cambium ingestion peaked in Apr, representing 48% of diet at that time, but analyses conservative since much fluid passes almost immediately out of stomach prior to stomach-content analysis (Beal 1911). Sap probably makes up 20% of diet annually (Short 1982), but at times may be 100% of diet (L. S. Eberhardt pers. comm.).
>
>
> Tyler Bell
> <jtylerbell...>
> California, Maryland
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