I am an idiot. Of all the things to forget about with gardening, I forgot about sparrows and dust baths (aka sand baths).
If you don’t know about this habit, the crazy almost rolling popping they do in such cases is them trying to fluff their feathers out to get the dust as near to their skin as possible. The dust on their skin helps act as a deterrent to pests that would live there and annoy and possibly sicken the birds.
So if you see something like that, the bird hasn’t gone mad. A cluster of them fluffing and flinging doesn’t mean they are a performance group. It’s just self care. Continue reading “We need a dust bath decoy”