Here in the U.S., many people will gather this week around the ritual of a meal intended to celebrate community and the ideals of sharing and supporting. We call this celebratory ritual Thanksgiving, of course, but similar traditions are known across the world from most cultures.

Celebratory or ritualized meals are common among humans, are there parallels within other parts of the animal world—in particular, the bird world—that could be part of the story of how such gatherings came to be in us humans?

One of the common threads in celebratory meal traditions seems to be that there is abundant food and drink. While birds and other animals often struggle with finding food and defending it from others, there are many situations when food is abundant. Consider well-stocked backyard bird feeding stations. Birds like black-capped chickadees and northern cardinals that would normally space themselves out by defending territories in habitats devoid of feeding stations, instead come into the abundant food in surprising numbers. When researchers band chickadees at a feeding station they often find there are dozens more than the feeder watcher thought. And many people have had the experience of looking out on a snowy winter day to see ten or twelve cardinals hopping in the snow under the feeders.

Backyard feeding stations aren’t the only types of continuous or relatively long-term food abundance of which birds take advantage. Dumps have always been famous for drawing in lots of birds to what is an almost never-ending food source. Like many birders, we’ve enjoyed countless hours at dumps (or “landfills,” as they are euphemistically called nowadays) watching hundreds or thousands of gulls and crows, dozens of eagles and ravens, and various other species.

But backyard feeding stations and dumps are essentially a type of continuous abundance. That’s not really the same as a celebratory meal that provides an abundance of food for a short time.

The first natural world parallel that comes to our mind is the seasonal abundance of spawning fish. Sure, it’s not something that happens over a single day like a Thanksgiving meal does, but it does last only a matter of weeks. Ospreys and bald eagles that nest near a spawning run have to give up trying to fight off the dozens of other ospreys and eagles that come in to feast at the abundant meal.

An insect hatch over a lake, river, or stream can attract hundreds of swallows and other birds for a short time. A dead animal in the woods can attract ravens, crows, eagles (sometimes a golden eagle in winter here in Maine), or turkey vultures (though only rarely in the dead of winter). We know from Bernd Heinrich’s research and writing that there is a lot of interesting social behavior going on within ravens in connection with these food sources.

If you’ve spent time watching bird interactions around a spring alewife run or come across an animal carcass in winter, it doesn’t typically look like a friendly sharing of food but rather a competition to see who can get the most. Either way, we like to imagine that they are, in their own way, giving thanks!

Jeffrey V. Wells, Ph.D., is a Fellow of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Vice President of Boreal Conservation for National Audubon. Dr. Wells is one of the nation's leading bird experts and conservation biologists. He is a coauthor of the seminal “Birds of Maine” book and author of the “Birder’s Conservation Handbook.” His grandfather, the late John Chase, was a columnist for the Boothbay Register for many years. Allison Childs Wells, formerly of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is a senior director at the Natural Resources Council of Maine, a nonprofit membership organization working statewide to protect the nature of Maine. Both are widely published natural history writers and are the authors of the popular books, “Maine’s Favorite Birds” (Down East Books) and “Birds of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao: A Site and Field Guide,” (Cornell University Press).