Has anyone seen that before? Zim and I have a couple of does with fawns who come around the house and we have been shocked by the number of deer flies on them this year. Over the last few days, we have seen some newly hatched phoebes landing and flying all around the deer, and then finally picking deer flies right off the deer! At first, the deer jumped when the birds flew right into them, but now it appears that the deer are allowing it and standing still while this takes place. Wow! The whole world is in harmony out there!!!

I wish we could train those little phoebes to grab deer flies from Zim while he works in the garden!

Cool post. Thanks for sharing.

That is cool !
The baby phoebes we had fledged and fly all over the ranch house yard.

I've seen brown headed cow birds eating bugs off of deer many times.

At my friend Sandy's, they would eat bugs off of her goats. She caught a lot of the brown headed cow birds, on accident, in her sparrow/starling trap.

Keith

Should be killing every brown headed cowbird you can catch

Parasitic nesters, meaning they lay their eggs in someone else's nest to be incubated and raised by others. And the chick will push all other chicks out to their death.

Send some of those phoebes my way, I wouldn't mind one riding my shoulder and keeping the sand/deer flies off of me