TAME WILD BIRDS [Ref]
We think of wild birds as being shy creatures by nature. For those of us who have kept a feeding station for birds in the winter so as to have the pleasure of association with the chickadee, nuthatches, woodpeckers, and other visitors, one of the most attractive things is that the wild birds become tame. Through association with persons they gradually learn that human beings are not to be feared. The high point of many a bird lover's experience is when a chickadee becomes so tame that it will perch on his body and without fear will feed from his hand.
It seems to be true that birds in wilderness areas are wilder and more shy of men than those living about dwellings where they are protected. This is notably true of the robin. In villages they hop around on the ground unmindful of the near presence of humans. How different they are in the wilderness, where the robins fly away apparently in great fear, while the human intruder is still far distant.
It comes as a considerable surprise to find that here and there over the world there are instances of birds with so little fear of humans that they come and perch on them.
PERCHING ON PEOPLE In the Galápagos Islands, where the general fearlessness of birds is famous, one of these cases is recorded. David Lack, who was studying the biology of the Galápagos Islands' birds, found when walking through the woods on Indefatigable Island that a flycatcher would sometimes try to settle on his head. Lack stood still and found the bird's object was to pull out some of his hair. The bird, having failed to detach any of the hair of his head, tried, apparently with no better success, to pull out hair from his eyebrows and then from his chest. This was at the height of the breeding season and apparently the bird was trying to get nesting material. This seemed to be a usual type of behavior there, and Lack correlated it with the general tameness of the birds on the islands.
There is a honey eater in Australia that includes in its pattern of behavior perching on people's heads and shoulders and attempting to pull out hair for use in its nest. A. H. Chisholm writes of going to certain places and taking companions with him for the sake of experiencing this, and the practice is so common with the species that Australians refer to this honey eater as "the hair dresser." In this case it is not tameness alone. The white-eared honey eater, which indulges in this practice, is no more tame most of the time than any of the other small local birds that live in that part of Australia. Only at nesting time does it attempt to light on persons. Chisholm correlates this hair-plucking trait with other habits of the honey eater: he speaks of its gathering hair from such animals as rock wallabies and gathering bristles from farmyard pigs and goats.
Our familiar phoebe has been recorded as perching on deer hunters in the fall and using them as a vantage point from which to conduct its hunting. This was in North Carolina, and the weather being warm, mosquitoes were notably in evidence. The bird showed no sign of fear or nervousness, but perched on the hunter's gun, on top of his head, and various parts of his body, and then flew out and picked up mosquitoes. As the hunter's face seemed to be attracting more mosquitoes the phoebe directed his attentions there. In picking mosquitoes off his face the sharp points of the bird's bill were noticeably felt at every capture and the irritation caused by a succession of these pricks caused the hunter to decide that he could take care of the mosquito situation better without the help of the phoebe. As H. H. Brimley, the hunter, put it "... my face was beginning to feel somewhat inflamed from the frequent pecks to which it had been subjected so I called it a day and told the phoebe to stop pestering me." This took place in a wild part of North Carolina and Brimley suggested that the phoebe's abnormal lack of fear was caused by its having never seen a human being before.