This winter a murder of crows has claimed my neighborhood as their natural habitat. They have scared most of the other birds away. They are loud and obnoxious. My dog hates them, growls and barks at them and chases them, but they keep coming back.
Feral and “outdoor” cats.
Cats are harmful to humans in many ways, collapsing wild bird populations everywhere they’ve been introduced not the least of them. Collapse bird populations - harmful insect populations rise. West Nile virus, Chikungunya, Dengue, coming up. Then there’s allergies/asthma and toxoplasmosis (look that up, it’s fascinating). Why we - the sane people - allow the “other people” to keep them around puzzles me no end. Especially if they let them outside their homes to inflict harm on local ecosystems.
Buy yourself a medium sized havahart trap and keep a garbage can full of water for disposal. You’d be amazed at how many cats you can trap in a year’s time.
Oh, and for the cat-lovers/whiners, I’ve heard it, save your electrons. I happen to love cats, I can just never eat a whole one.
Frogs, snakes, alligators have all shown abnormalities.
j/k
5.56mm
I’m to the west of you. The cardinals came in last week. Other than that, this isn’t the time of year for much activity at feeders. The birds are still enjoying all of the natural seeds in the fields and woods. When the natural foods run low, they’ll start coming to your feeders.
Two reasons birds shy from an area are first, predator birds like hawks, and second, domestic cats, which decimate both adult birds and their hatchlings.
This time of year I usually see murmurations of blackbirds that fill the sky on my commute to work. I saw one piddly flock this morning. I even made a note of the lack of birds. Odd.
Birds? I hav...***beeeellllch!!!!*** haven't seen any birds!
That's my story and I'm stickin' to it!
I’m in Alabama 160 miles due North of Panama City. Plenty of birds on my land.
Lot’s of Cardinals, and the males already fighting, plenty of Mockingbirds still around, lots of different woodpeckers, nuthatches and Yellowhammers laughing away.
Plenty of Towhees scattering dried leaves and sounding like a heard of elephants in the woods.
I’ve got a ton of crows flying around, a few hawks, and plenty of buzzards looking for dead things.
I’m sure this can be tied to global warming somehow.
They are all up here in metro Atlanta especially the Starlings.
I see a lot of crows
They’ve migrated to the bottom of the oceans where the warm air is hiding.
Not many in East Texas either. My bird feeder was untouched for a month. I thought the feed had mealie worms or something. A few days ago, they began to appear. Mostly Cardinals at first.
The City of Key West claims to have 40,000 outdoor catsa major destination for migrating songbirds! In the Florida Keys, I visit a friend who has a “outdoor” cat; invariably, the cat kills a bird each time I visit. One day, her cat presented us with a warm, but dead, Cardinal. An hour later, my friend and I were watching a lizard that was dining on fire ants. “Remarkable”, we thoughtthen her cat came over and killed it, too! :(
Seem to be about the same number here in south Jersey, although it usually takes them awhile to come back to the feeder as the weather turns colder in the late fall....
I can flip you a few birds if you need. :)
Judging by the date you most likely have a coopers or sharp shin hawk visiting you on migration. I’m to your south and around the same time I had a couple of them, inexperienced ones, mobbing my aviary- boy was one surprised when he dived at a conure and I popped up instead when my birds let rip the alarms calls- I had been stooped over inside scooping feed for my birds. It’s seasonal.