What kind of feed is there at the diamonds crossing at Rochelle for all the birds there. Is loose grain still hauled by train.Do they lose that much to get that large of bird concentration.?Maybe just another dumb question.
Corn or wheat are the most probable grains. I’ve noticed the birds tend to gather on the ballast most frequently just after sunrise and on the eastern side of the diamonds.
If you have ever seen an elevator loading covered hopper cars, there sometimes is a little spillage around the hatch of the hopper. I think that it might ride there for a considerable distance, and then be bounced/shaken off the car as it crosses the diamonds.
Grain trains thru here have “scouts” that check the trains. Really. They are smart enough to know what hauls coal/commodities and what is grain. When the scout starts to check out the grain trains, the rest of the flock will follow close behind. Birds don’t have a sense of smell, so they tell me, so eyesight is probably what they depend on and some kind of a memory of which cars might be hauling grain.
And the predator birds will fly after them so they might be able to get a pigeon to fly into a moving car. Have seen that twice! Guess when it comes to grocery shopping for dinner, you get really creative.
Some of the biggest and best fed turkeys are in the yard in Council Bluffs. One time we had to drive around a of couple tracks, no road crossing on one end, and found a couple of cars that were getting special attention. There were about two dozen turkeys eating the spilled grain. About half were up on the covered hopper’s roof taking care of the grain up there.
There are also quite a few deer living down in the yard, also feasting on spilled grain. There is some new tracks going in and they might both be losing some of their vegetation cover.
If the railroad ever hands out turkeys for the holidays, I’ll bet I know where they came from.
Jeff
I heard someplace that birds remember better the places where they’ve found food.
[:-,] Wonder if that applies to mudchickens as well . . . [swg]
- Paul North.
Paul…yes it does! [(-D]
We get the occasional hawk that will leapfrog in front of the train, looking for varmits we may scare out of the trackwork…