This is bird note.

If you like drama, watch the junkos at your bird feeder.

These small brown birds will get quite feisty around food.

You'll see one bird come in to grab a bite,

then another darts over and pushes the first bird off,

or two birds may have a little tiff with their tails flared out.

What's going on here?

Birds and flocks almost invariably develop a literal pecking order.

Or, as scientists call it, a dominance hierarchy. The term comes from studies of

chickens, which found that there was an alpha chicken that could peck any other chicken in the flock.

A beta chicken could peck all others except the alpha, and so on. Think of the poor omega chicken

all the way at the bottom. With junkos, we know that males are

dominant to females and adults are dominant to young birds. So, next time you see a group of birds,

pay close attention to the dynamics among them. Who's the alpha? And who's the beta? Can you spot the omega?

Do the birds flock together or work apart? You can learn about all kinds of birds when you

come to our website, birdnote.org. I'm Mary McCann.