One of the blessings of this Covid-winter has been the antics of a large flock of Common Redpolls who have been daily visitors for the last couple of months. When I take to feeders out every morning about daybreak, they are gathering in the tall trees, chattering away. Usually there are about fifty, sometimes double that – and once they decide to chow down, it’s wonderful chaos.
With the forecast of warm weather, I suspect this gang will be heading north in the next few days. Bon voyage!
One of our reliable backyard birds is a Carolina Wren (or two) which is an unusual winter visitor.
Here’s the range map which with global warming, is likely changing.
We’ll keep the seeds and suet coming and enjoy this bouncy bundle of energy. Think Spring!
On these cold wet Vermont days, it’s nice to have a coterie of birds coming to our backyard. Northern Cardinals, even wet ones, add a splash of color and the Chickadees and Goldfinches add their energy to otherwise drab days. I went back and looked at some shots I took in the last month — and was delighted to remember this red and white combo.
And living on the river, we still are getting Mallards, a Belted Kingfisher, and several mergansers. Here is one from last week.
One of my goals this winter is to get some decent photos of Red-breasted Nuthatches and Brown Creepers. What are yours?
The other morning, through the falling snow I noticed a bird different from the normal crew of chickadees, nuthatches, woodpeckers etc. Getting out the binoculars, I was surprised to see this male Red-winged Blackbird pecking away at the suet. I haven’t seen one for weeks so this guy either missed the departure announcement or was passing through from up north.
After a half hour of feeding he departed, hopefully southward. It will be four months or so until we first hear that “conk-la ree” that tells us that Spring in fact is about here.
A heaping helping of Evening Grosbeaks from the FeederWatch Cam in Ontario.
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Common Redpoll photo by Missy Mandel
The next season for the Project FeederWatch Citizen Science program begins in just one week! Share your observations about the birds coming to your feeders between November and April, and help reveal important patterns in bird numbers and distribution over time. The FeederWatch website has a fresh look for the program’s 27th season as a North America-wide initiative, and offers new web tools to make participation and exploration even easier and more fun.
Check out the interactive Common Feeder Birds online tool to explore food and feeder preferences for nearly 100 species of common feeder birds! This exciting new resource is cross-referenced and searchable by region, bird species, food type, and feeder type.
We also recommend a visit to the Ontario FeederWatch Cam to enjoy a live view of activity at the feeders of Bird Studies Canada members Tammie and Ben Haché in Manitouwadge, ON. If you aren’t lucky enough to have Evening Grosbeaks in your neighbourhood this weekend, try catching a glimpse of them online at the Hachés’ feeders!
Buttoning up windows for winter is great for energy conservation but no longer can you hear the “toot” on the Red-breasted Nuthatch or the chatter of Common Redpolls. Rich Guthrie, who write a great birding blog, discovered a simple solution to this dilemma several years ago. He writes:
By putting a baby-room monitor outside, I can listen to those sounds – even as I sit here at my desk, day, or night.
Now I can hear the distant Pileated Woodpecker calling from the island across the way, or the nuthatch taking another sunflower seed from the porch feeder. What a delight!
The set-up consists of plugging in the “baby” part outside, and the mommy listening device inside. Fortunately, I have a covered porch so I can keep the thing out of the weather.
These monitors are fairly common at yard sales or thrift shops and come cheap. I wouldn’t lay out more than $5.00 for a set.
As a different dimension to my yard list, I should have kept a list of the many different species I’ve heard and identified via the monitor. But I already know that the list is long. I can recall hearing Snow Geese flying over in the dark of night or picking up on the flight calls of flocks of Brant winging up the river. There’s a flock of Canada Geese that comes in to the same beach each evening – usually just before dark. I get to hear them now and then through the night. Other nice nighttime revelations picked-up include Screech or Great-horned Owls hooting, coyotes singing away, or raccoons squabbling in the dark.
It’s so nice to be here in the comfort of home and share the joy of a melodious Song Sparrow welcoming the warmth of sunrise on a frosty morning. Or to learn that a flock of siskins has decided to stop in for a snack.
Cornell Project Feederwatch folks wrote:
Steve Maley, a master Jack-of-all-trades and volunteer at Braddock Bay Bird Observatory, suggests rigging up a baby monitor for a low-cost solution that lets you hear the birds all year long.
Steve writes, “Cold weather has come to Rochester, NY, the windows are closed, and the bird hordes come to the feeders. Your home insulation keeps you warm, but silences the noisy blue jays, the woodpecker calls, and the goldfinch chatter. But you can still enjoy those bird sounds from your warm living room. Pick a window with a good roof overhang, and hang a $20 baby monitor outside near the top of the window. The receiving unit can go inside wherever you want to hear the birds. Plug in the 9 volt DC transformers, turn on both units, and once again enjoy hearing the birds from inside your living room or kitchen. My monitor has been on since last spring, and the receiver gets turned on only when I want to enjoy ‘being outside’ to hear the birds.”
All fall, we have watched birds flock to our sunflower seed feeder, our thistle feeder, and our suet containers. As I wrote last month, our feed store folks love us — we are going through a lot of bird food.
Where does all this food go? I know that some of our visitors are eating it on the spot but many seem to fly away with one or more seeds in their craw. Recall our discussion of Common Redpolls and their “pocket.”
It turns out that birds have three options to make it through the time when there is little food.
White-breasted Nuthatches and their red-breasted brethren also store food for later dining. I often see them nabbing a large seed and flying off.
Our most frequent visitors to the feeders are Black-capped chickadees which are well known for their food-hoarding behavior. Usually they hoard seeds but they are also known to store insects and spiders may be stored as well. I’ve seen hundreds of chickadees grab sunflower seeds and pieces of suet from bird feeders. They remove the husk of a seed before caching it. I’ve seen a few stashing seeds in the bark of our white pines.
The number of seeds stored is staggering. Over 1,000 items may be stored in a single day and, over the course of autumn, 50,000 to 80,000 seeds may be cached. Sites for food storage are varied. Typical hiding places are cracks or crevices in woody vegetation, under bits of bark (particularly birch bark), in clusters of conifer needles, in the ground and even in the snow.
Other food hogs at the feeder are Blue Jays which are energetic hoarders, storing acorns and other nuts but even invertebrates, small vertebrates or bits of meat. Favored storage sites are cracks and crevices of tree trunks, amid the needles of conifers and in loose soil.
A blue jay can carry up to five acorns at once to be stored. The acorns are swallowed and stored in the upper part of the esophagus. The acorns can then be regurgitated intact when a suitable hoarding site is found.
Several Western birds are known for their hoarding. Pinon Jays and Clark’s Nutcrackers both rely heavily on hoarding to get through the winter. Both species store pine seeds, which they laboriously remove from pinecones. A single Clark’s nutcracker can store up to 100,000 seeds in the fall. Both nutcrackers and pinon jays do not raid their hoarded seeds until most of the fall seed crop is depleted. One researcher has determined that up to 90 percent of the winter diet of Pinon Jays comes from stored seeds.
Western Scrub Jays take a lot of precautions with their food. When another jay is watching, a scrub jay will store food in difficult to see places (far from an observer, behind a visual barrier, etc.). Often, if observed while hiding food, later, when unobserved, it will move food to another location.
How does a long-term hoarder like Clark’s Nutcracker recover stored seeds when it needs them? Ornithologists at first thought that the food was stored only in certain kinds of areas, and that the birds rediscovered it by later foraging in the same areas. But research shows that individuals can recall where they have cached seeds. The birds remember where the seeds are in relation to certain landmarks, such as rocks. If the landmarks are moved, the areas the birds search are displaced an equivalent amount.
Out of all the species of woodpeckers, only 10 are known to hoard food. Our Downy Woodpeckers and Hairy Woodpeckers are among the ten but only infrequently store food.
As I noted before, Northern Shrikes store food in an interesting way. Small mammals or birds are killed and then impaled on a thorn or barbed wire fence for later consumption, hence the reason for calling these hoarders “butcher birds”.
As we head into serious winter conditions, it’s comforting to know that many of our prior visitors have stashed food away. in case our buddies are having a brain cramp and like us, forgetting where they put things, we’ll keep the feeders clean and full.
Have you observed a bird hoarding food? Tell us about it with a comment below. You should sign up by RSS feed or via email to have future articles sent to you. Thanks
White-breasted Nuthatch by Dawn Huczek
Blue Jay by Ingrid Taylar Western Scrub Jay by jessicafm
Ever watch a Black-capped Chickadee or White-breasted Nuthatch pick away at the feeder, discarding stuff left and right until a sunflower seed pops up?
Eat the millet — it’s good for you!
I have a deck littered with millet and other rejected seeds as Nuthatches, Chickadees, and finches select the good stuff. So why did I buy bags of mixed seeds? It seemed to be an economical way to feed birds but the only folks happy are the chipmunks and red squirrels, and an occasional night-time raccoon who vacuum up the leftovers.
Last week, Mary got sick of sweeping the deck (as did I) so she bought a bag of black oil sunflower seeds — the feed we have used in years past — and the birds no longer have a choice. (Well, they still do because I have to integrate the rest of the mix into the feeder — but of course, even camouflaged with sunflowers, it still gets left there.
When I read this article from BirdWatching Magazine, I thought, “Well, I think we did the right thing.” Here’s an excerpt:
As a result of this year’s drought and high temperatures, agricultural prices are expected to reach record-setting levels. Economizing on bird feeding is a priority. Below are tips that will help you do so while increasing both your enjoyment and your feeding’s value to birds.
Sunflower-seed prices are high, for sure, but switching to cheaper mixes that include a little sunflower seed and more generic “bird seed” is an excellent example of being penny wise but pound foolish. Most birds ignore a lot of the seeds in mixes, especially inexpensive ones, and not only are those filler seeds a waste of money but some attract nuisance wildlife such as rats. Just as bad, seed that doesn’t get eaten rots, exposing your birds to disease-causing bacteria and fungus.
Many of the smaller seeds in mixes are popular with birds that don’t need subsidies from us and cause problems for native birds. Although it’s counterintuitive, in the long run, you’ll spend less by offering sunflower seed alone. You’ll still be providing food for the widest mixture of native birds, including chickadees and nuthatches, finches, small woodpeckers, jays, and doves…
We’ll feed sunflower seed, niger seed for the finches, and suet for the woodpeckers. That should keep our birds, and our farm supply store, happy this winter.
We know that squirrels make the most of fall’s plenty by hoarding nuts for the winter, but the fact that birds also store, or cache, food goes largely unappreciated. Through clever observation and experiments, biologists have found that food caching (from the French cacher, “to hide”) has developed to a high art in some birds.
Take the chickadee, for instance. Chickadees put tens of thousands of food items a year into short-term storage. They usually retrieve and eat the food in the space of several days. Each food item is cached in a different place to make it difficult for thieves to steal all the food at once. When hiding a new item, they remember their previous storage sites and avoid placing caches too close together.
The Black-Capped Chickadee hides seeds and other food items to eat later. Each item is placed in a different spot and the chickadee can remember thousands of hiding places.
Chickadees remember each hiding place for around a month, even though they may be scattered widely across a bird’s territory. Research shows they use visual cues to navigate back to each of their cache sites by a combination of larger landscape features, particularly verticals, and use of the sun as compass. Smaller local details are not as critical, probably because these often change in a forest. When retrieving food, they remember which sites have been emptied, either by them or by robbers, to avoid fruitless searching.
How does a tiny bird have such brain power?
Chickadees begin to store food at the onset of fall, when seeds become abundant. At the same time, the region of the brain that handles spatial memory (part of the hippocampus) starts to grow in size by producing new brain cells to handle the huge amount of cache data. It continues to grow as more food is cached. Come spring, reliance on food stores drops, caching dwindles, and the brain area shrinks. Brain cells use a lot of energy, so to conserve resources the extra cells last only as long as they are needed. Brain growth is tied to food availability, since captive chickadees that receive plentiful food year-round do not undergo seasonal brain changes…
(Read whole article by Li Shen, an adjunct professor at the Dartmouth Medical School and the chair of the Thetford, Vermont, Conservation Commission)
Image by qmnonic
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