Nuts About Nuthatches

John and Betty Miller haven’t opened their doors to birds. But the Moscow couple has given them the walls.

When a pair of nesting pygmy nuthatches pecked a hole through the wood siding of the rural home, the Millers welcomed the company. Eventually, there was considerable commotion in the wall. So the Millers did what any curious birdwatcher would do.

They cut a hole through the sheet rock in their living room.

“Patching sheet rock is a small price to pay for entertainment like this,” Betty said.

The Millers patiently waited until the female was out of the nest. With Betty on guard outside, John quickly sliced a 6-by-12-inch hole, exposing the fiberglass insulation, 2-by-4 studs, electrical wiring - and a neat little nest with six eggs.

He covered the hole with clear Plexiglass and a paper curtain that could be shut to give the birds privacy for all but their brief periods of observation.

Nuthatches are small, stubby, tree-walking birds that characteristically walk headfirst down tree trunks and branches as they hunt and peck for bugs.

Although red-breasted and white breasted nuthatches are more common, Moscow is a fringe area for pygmy nuthatches, John said.

More than a dozen bird boxes were occupied on the Miller’s 11 acres this year by species including Western bluebirds, tree swallows and wrens.

But the birds closest to home captured the show.

The pygmy nuthatches first began pecking at the house siding last year. The Millers fastened a nest box above the excavation, but after checking it out, the nuthatches decided not to stay.

This year, possibly the same pair returned, finished pecking the hole into the wall and settled in.

Eventually, the Millers stationed their video camera on a tripod near the hole so they could sit on the couch away from the nest and watch the action on the color television screen, which displayed the birds about five times larger than life-size.

“This is the best TV we’ve seen in a long time,” John said as the mother bird popped through the half-inch diameter hole and into the nest.

The Millers have about 14 hours of video taken during the incubation and throughout the 22-days from the time the first chicks hatched to the morning they flew out of the nest. The Millers plan to edit the footage to a 30-minute program they can show at meetings and at the Wild Birds Unlimited shops they run in Moscow and Spokane.

The month-long study in chick rearing offered all sorts of insights into chick rearing. During the incubation, the male bird fed the female, who left the nest only a few times a day.

The most exciting moment was lifting the paper curtain and seeing one egg opening and another shaking.

“The mother gave them only a little help to get out of their shells,” Betty said, noting that the parent hovered over them as they wiggled and pecked. One chick rocked for some time with a helmet-shaped piece of shell stuck on his head until the mother finally took it off.

“She ate some shell pieces and took the rest outside the nest,” Betty said.

Feeding the new brood was a full-time job that ran from before sunrise to after sunset every day.

At first the parents brought in mostly tiny spiders and grubs. Gradually, the food expanded to lady bugs, seeds, wiggly green caterpillars, and even peanuts from the yard feeders.

Tending chicks is the ultimate give-and-take relationship for nuthatches. When the chicks are very young, nature wraps their urine and feces in a handy sack, which the parents remove from the nest.

“Birds don’t have hands to change diapers, so nature gave them a better system,” Betty said. “In the early stages, after the chicks would lift their heads to get a meal, they’d also raise their bottoms to expose a fecal sack, which the parent would dutifully pack out of the nest.

“When they were really small, they’d remove a sack every time they’d feed.”

One night, the Millers heard an extraordinary ruckus in the wall. They peered under the flap to see the mother nuthatch wiggling and thrashing with her head buried into the nest.

John suspects she was enlarging the nest for her growing brood.

“All I could see was her tail sticking up and little bird bodies being plopped here and there,” Betty said. “It was like she was fluffing the pillows.”

Of the six eggs, four hatched one day, one hatched a day later and one did not hatch.

The unhatched egg disappeared from the nest somehow.

Although the parents made efforts to feed the younger chick, it never caught up in weight and strength to the other nestlings.

“When the others fledged, the little one wasn’t strong enough to climb up to the hole,” Betty said. “The first day, the parents kept coming back to feed the little one. But the second day they didn’t come back.”

By the third day, the little one was dead.

“We wanted to observe without intervening,” Betty said. “This was nature’s way.”

Now that the show is over for the season, the Millers haven’t decided what to do with the hole in their living room wall.

“We might insulate it for the winter, but I think we’ll leave the hole there and see what happens next spring,” Betty said. “It’s a small eyesore considering what we got out of it.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo