Birds eating bugs on cars

As spring and warmer weather slowly creeps towards us, I got to thinking about bugs. Specifically, I was thinking about how few bugs get caught on car windshields these days. But when I started looking for research on this I got distracted by birds using bugs on cars as a food source.

Jokimäki and Kaisanlahti-Jokimäki (2023) studied how urban birds use bugs on the front of cars as a food source. It makes perfect sense. Why spend the effort flying around after darting insects or extracting bugs from the bark of trees when you could settle down to a buffet in a parking lot. Picking dead bugs off of cars has to be less work. Which is why it is even more interesting that this behaviour isn’t very common.

The study was carried out in Finland. What they found was there were only seven species that visited the car buffet. These were all the likely candidates including sparrows, crows, and magpies. These species are urban exploiters. They are species that can adapt to the entirely human environment. And they are sedentary. They stay in one area for all their needs.

I definitely think of these birds as opportunists. As a result, I’m not surprised that these are the first species to take advantage of this human induced opportunity. But even for these species the behaviour is unusual.

The research was done through observations by the researchers and by citizen scientists (amateur birders in this case). Of these people, 60% reported that they rarely or never saw the behaviour.

So, it isn’t widespread yet. But I wonder if that is the same in other locations. So this summer, keep your eyes out for birds eating off of the front of cars.

.