The Great Peanut Shell Mystery
I solved one of life's little mysteries the other day.
For almost a month I have been finding empty peanut shells floating in my birdbath. I should mention here that according to the books my bath placement is all wrong.
My tall cement birdbath is situated less than ten feet from my feeder and, horrors, it is overhung by trees and shrubs (a definite no-no because the water gets dirty so quickly).
When I first noticed the shells, I assumed their location was accidental.
The blue jay that comes for the peanuts each day must have cracked open a nut while perched in the lilac that leans out over the bath. But no, the jays always carry their booty to the branches of the big cedar beside the house before shelling.
Hmmm, surely it couldn't be the squirrels.
They never work as hard to get a free drink as they do to get at the free food. Nor would it be the raccoon we've seen stretching up on tiptoe to sip bath water in the early evening. By the time this bandit makes its rounds, the peanuts are long gone. I decided to adopt a wait-and-see attitude.
Recently I had a breakthrough in "the case of the empty peanut shells."
I was eating lunch when a lovely common grackle, Quiscalus quiscula, landed -- none too lightly -- on my platform feeder. The grackle picked up a whole peanut and flew directly to the birdbath. What I saw next made me laugh out loud and once again marvel at the ingenuity of a bird brain.
This individual dropped the nut into the water. The bird then used its beak to crack open the floating peanut. The kernels inside sank to the bottom to be retrieved, sans shell, and eaten. I have since witnessed this operation repeated as described several times. So simple and so logical.
This behaviour begs the question, how did the bird learn to follow this sequence? I have never seen the like before. Is my grackle the inventor or do all grackles do this?
Here's my hypothesis.
Grackle chez Girdler accidentally drops peanut in birdbath while flying from feeder. Flies down to pick it up but, since nut floats, pecks at it and breaks it open. Kernel sinks, clean-shelled easy-to-eat nut incentive to try behavior again. Works every time. (Try it yourself.)
Water-shelling technique now becomes the method of choice, to be passed on to the little "gracklets" as soon as they leave the nest. Evolution condensed.
I may be way off here, but necessity and fluke are, after all, the mother of invention. Just look at the whole man and fire thing. And, who would have predicted the quantum leap taken when someone realized mouldy bread could save lives?
Now, I ask, has anyone else observed this technique? In a way, I hope not. I like to think that because I broke the rules of birdbath placement I somehow provided the catalyst for this marvelous sequence of events to take place. Not too modest, am I?
Actually, I give all the credit to the grackle. Bravo. Peanuts all round! The naturalist Beth Girdler writes from Ayer's Cliff, Quebec.
Copyright © 2000 Beth Girdler/Log Cabin Chronicles/08.00 |
