Dogs And Birds
You may laugh at me for posting this story, but I found it intriguing for personal reasons. I have five dogs — five English Setters — which are allegedly "bird dogs." Some of them actually point birds and look quite classic about it. However, a couple of them do things like bark at the birds which fly in to eat the seed in my neighbor's bird feeder, or chase the birds which land on our fence.
However, we used to live where we had three acres and all of the neighborhood cats hunted in our fields. It was very funny because not only birds, but rabbits and squirrels would come inside the fenced part of the yard, where the dogs were, because they felt safer, even with the dogs barking and chasing them, than they did out in the fields with the cats! For the record, the dogs never caught anything. They're all bark. I think the birds and rabbits and squirrels knew that.
Dog Bird's Best Friend
By DON KNOWLER
10jul 05
(from Dog Stories From The News)
A RESEARCHER drawing up a blueprint to attract birds to the suburbs has made an intriguing discovery — dogs can be good for our feathered friends.
Grant Daniels, 22, has surveyed 214 gardens in 10 Hobart suburbs and found that those with dogs are more likely to have a healthy population of ground-feeding birds like superb fairy-wrens.
Mr Daniels, a University of Tasmania school of geography and environmental studies graduate, said it appeared the dogs ignored birds and, because of this lack of aggression, birds in turn were happy to co-exist with the canines.
"Where there are dogs you are more likely to find fairy-wrens and possibly masked lapwings," he said.
"Ground-feeders have learned they have nothing to fear from most dogs, unlike the threat posed by cats."
Mr Daniels, from Clifton Beach, said a big factor was that dogs tended to chase off cats, or at least spoil their predatory attempts, and this was good for ground-foraging birds.
But, in the wider environment, there was a downside to dogs' behaviour.
"Dogs might be beneficial in some cases in the garden environment, but it should not promote irresponsible dog ownership in areas of shorebird habitat or muttonbird rookeries," he said.
Although cats were the natural enemy of birds, Mr Daniels said his own research didn't lead to this conclusion.
He was quick to point out, however, that a garden-scale project might not accurately reveal the influence of birds on suburban gardens because cats ventured into most suburban yards regardless of their own residence.
On making gardens more bird-friendly, he found the right combination of plants, and their height, could have a crucial effect on bird populations.
Mr Daniels said he devised his honours project because little research had been done on the garden environment, even though each year vast areas of Australia were enveloped by suburbia.
He hopes his research on the factors influencing bird populations in the back yard — or, as he describes it, "variation in the bird species assemblages of domestic gardens" — will aid planners and architects to factor in the needs of wildlife when new housing developments are planned and help gardeners in existing suburbs make their yards more bird-friendly.
