Birds in Harvested Grain Fields

One afternoon in early August I was driving in Lancaster County, through a manicured cropland with few trees and no hedgerows. A large flock of mourning doves perched on wires between power towers caught my eye. While I watched, most of those doves flew, group after group, to a nearby field. I drove to that field and saw the doves landing among grain stubble and newly-sprouted plants. I counted over 300 of them, both young of the year and adults, as they walked about to picked up grain missed by the automatic harvester. And there were scores each of rock pigeons, purple grackles and starlings, mature birds and youngsters of every species, also eating grain in that field. The grackles and starlings would also have been ingesting any invertebrates they found as well. And over a dozen barn swallows and a few purple martins continually swooped low over those birds foraging in the field to snap up small insects stirred into the air by the doves and other birds.

Occasionally the hundreds of doves and scores of pigeons, grackles and starlings abruptly took flight at once, swirled over that field in mixed groups, landed into the wind onto the same field and immediately began feeding. The suddenness of those feathered routs and the numbers of birds flying together made them interesting to watch.

Horned Lark with an Attitude?

The adaptable birds discussed above, plus the equally adaptable killdeer plovers and horned larks regularly feed on seeds and invertebrates in croplands. The plovers and larks nest on bare ground fields and patches of gravel, as well as glean invertebrates from all fields around their respective nests.

The pigeons and barn swallows raise young in barns and under bridges. Purple martins hatch eggs in apartment bird house erected in many barnyards especially for them. The doves and grackles rear offspring in grassy nests in trees, particularly in planted, half-grown conifers. And starlings hatch babies in any crevice they can find, whether natural or human-made. But all these birds feed in fields near their nurseries, including harvested grain fields.

Obviously, all these bird species have adapted to human-made niches for feeding and nesting. Our activities have increased their feeding and nesting potentials, increasing their numbers. These birds happened onto a good thing and they take full advantage of it. They create communities of wildlife where otherwise there would not be any. And that is their main interest to me. I find it pleasurable to know that many species of wildlife adapt to what we do as a society, to their benefit. This is only one example of that. 

Horned Lark by Greg Schechter @ flickr.com