Watching bird (and other animal) behavior has always been of interest to me, and I’ve written previous posts about behavior. One behavior that I see often in my backyard birds involves them gleaning food off of the branches of the trees in the yard. They seem to be especially fond of the oak trees, but before now, I’ve never been able to see what it was they were eating. I suspected it was small insects of some sort, but the other day I finally got some good shots of a Carolina chickadee (Poecile carolinensis) as it engaged in this behavior. The chickadees will often hang from the branches or twigs that they are working on, so it’s easy to tell when they’re doing this. If you enlarge the image above, you’ll see that there is actually a row of small insect eggs attached to the underside of the twig. I have no idea what kind of eggs they are, but as I watched, the bird pulled each one off the branch and swallowed it down. Only when it had finished all the eggs (which didn’t take very long) did it lift its head and look around. It wasn’t but a fraction of a second before it was moving on to another little twig nearby and starting all over again. These little birds are very speedy with just about everything that they do, which means that when you can watch them, they are almost always engaged in something interesting.