How Do Bluebirds Catch Their Prey?

Video Transcript

"Hi my name is Andy Wood, I'm education director for Audubon North Carolina, and I'm here to talk about how do bluebirds catch their prey. Bluebirds are insectivorous birds. That is most of their diet is made up of live small animals, crickets, grasshoppers, caterpillars, beetles, moths a wide range of insects, and even spiders. Bluebirds are also members of a group of birds known as thrushes, and which includes robins, and several other species. So bluebirds are insectivorous, that is their diet is primarily insect matter, and they capture their food in a number of different ways. One being kind of unique to the thrush group, and that is called ground sallying. What a bluebird will do is sit on a low perch in a tree or on a fencepost, and look at the ground for ground based insects. Like crickets, grasshoppers, and spiders. When they see one they will leave their perch, hop down to the ground, grab the prey, fly back to their perch where they will butcher it. They basically kill the insect, and then break it into small parts and eat it down. If they are raising offspring they will take the insect back to the nest to feed to their offspring. Another way that they will obtain food is hovering, again kind of unique for the group of birds known as thrushes. They will hover over the ground looking for food on the ground, they will hover around a bush, especially in winter time when their diet consist of some fruits like blueberries, and well not so much blueberries, but holly berries and other fruiting trees. But because they are insect eaters much of their work is conducted in fields where you have lots of insects, and that is why you find bluebirds in open countryside rather than deep forest. And that is how bluebirds catch their food."