[SBB] Junco and cowbird

[Hintermeister Jan-AJH130 <[[email protected]]>]

Yesterday outside my office window at Kifer and Lawrence in Sunnyvale, I had a Dark-Eyed Junco feeding a young Brown-Headed Cowbird.  I've seen the pictures of a small parent feeding a much larger chick but this was the first time I've seen it live.  The cowbird was on a tree branch doing the wing-fluttering begging behavior and the junco flew in with food.
 
This comes about a week after I heard a very exciting cowbird talk by Stephen Rothstein at the Mono Basin Chautauqua.  For all its negative impacts, the Brown-Headed Cowbird is a remarkable species.  For example, unlike all other songbirds, the cowbird song (the gurgling intro followed by high pitched whistle) turns out to be not learned but is innate, i.e. young cowbirds isolated from other cowbirds will develop a normal song.  The cowbird also has a flight whistle that is learned and has dialects over geographical areas like many other songbirds.  
 
Jan Hintermeister
Santa Clara, CA
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