Feeding time
I haven’t been able to get out to bird much this fall and winter, so I’ve asked the birds to come to me. I have asked before, and they declined, but this winter they have obliged me.
I have missed getting out to my usual winter haunts, but my neighborhood has taken on a whole new perspective in terms of birding adventures. A previously unappreciated world has opened to me.
My portal to the bird life of the neighborhood is a second-story bedroom window in an alcove that I consider to be my office. The desk is facing a corner with a large window just to the left of the computer screen. The right-most window pane is filled with the view of a mature pine tree whose trunk is bare to the level of this second-story window. There are a lot of bushes around the base.
In this tree there is a double suet feeder and a large, cylindrical seed dispenser with six ports, each with its own perch. For my convenience initially, but it turns out that it works great for the birds, too. The seed feeder hangs from the base of the suet feeder, and the two are hoisted up to the level of my window and tucked up under the first level of pine foliage.
The feeders are surrounded on all sides except for the one facing the window, and their positioning affords remarkable security from the neighborhood merlin. I have never seen it drop in for lunch, but it streaks past at house-top level from time to time.
I have a resident group of species that stop by frequently to sample the wares. At the top of the menu are two suet blocks, each containing sunflower seeds as a part of the mix. The feeder is filled with millet and a healthy sampling of black sunflower seeds.
I feel a little guilty every time I put out the sunflower seeds. My pet macaw, AnnaMaria, yearns for sunflower seeds, but a past diet of mostly peanuts and sunflower seeds, along with the sedentary lifestyle of a pet bird, has damaged her liver and now she eats a low-fat diet.
The feeder birds crave the fat and oils of the suet and seeds, so they get it all. Most of the day, the cage surrounding the suet blocks is covered by the noisy, hyperactive flock of pygmy nuthatches that is never far away. Even the pair of red-breasted nuthatches that has staked out my pine tree will sit back and watch in disgust as the pygmys swarm like bees over the food.
The pygmy flock is always a group, but the red-breasteds are often solitary diners – I can tell the male from the female and I think I’d know if a strange bird snuck in. I’ve never enjoyed such a personal relationship with individual wild birds before.
The pygmy flock moves too much to allow individual familiarity the way the red-breasteds do. In fact, the other day the red-breasted pair sat quietly on separate branches, a few feet apart, and looked to be carrying on a subdued conversation, quite unlike the usual loud buzzing I hear if one of the pair is not near.
Of course the pygmys are never similarly quiet. Typical of any large family, they squabble constantly, fighting over perches on the seed feeder even when there are identical, vacant perches still available. They remind me so much of my kids.
Before the subzero nights we had last month, there were always 11 pygmys in the fray. Now there are nine. Life can be tough out there, but they go on as if nothing happened. I was relieved when both of the red-breasteds were still around. Life is life, but I would have mourned the loss of one of the two familiars in a way I did not the loss of a couple out of the indistinguishable many.
The nuthatches are certainly the dominant birds of my neighborhood, but they are far from the only visitors I have. There is a large resident flock of house sparrows that live year-round in the hedge that forms a fence beneath the pine. They like the seed feeder, ignore the suet, but spend most of their time on the ground below the feeders.
Birds are messy eaters – also just as are my kids. Still, I supplement the normal spillage from the feeder with a generous helping of millet and sunflower seeds on the ground. That helps keep the house sparrows down, out of view, and also pleases the small flock of dark-eyed juncos that stops by most days.
One weekend there was even a song sparrow popping in and out of the hedge to feed on the ground. The most fun, however, is that the ground seed also has drawn in the neighborhood flock of California quail. I love to watch the little feather-covered tennis balls.
They scratch the ground like the miniature chickens they are, flinging perfectly good seeds out of reach to the rear. When there was snow, they had no problem getting down through it with this technique. Then, with appetites sated, the whole flock of about 20 birds would roost for the night in my pine. The quail blend into the branches perfectly, their scaled breasts seeming to be pine cones at a careless glance.
Then, eyeball to eyeball, from tree to window, my movements, even with the window open, never drew their notice. However, walking out the front door would trigger nervous pitt-pitt calls from above. Since the weather has warmed, the quail have roosted elsewhere – foul-weather friends, I guess.
There are also frequent visits by a family of house finches, the male with almost Cassin’s finchlike breast coloration. He gets my hopes up every time he visits. Less frequent have been visits by a white-breasted nuthatch, a brown creeper, and a female downy woodpecker. Remarkable by their absence are the European starlings that dominate the neighborhood in the summer.
I actually miss their antics. I had one individual last spring that perfectly mimicked the calls of eight different species; California quail, Canada goose – I wouldn’t have believed without seeing, northern flicker, western wood-pewee – eight weeks before any arrived, American crow, American robin, red-tailed hawk, red-winged blackbird; all in one afternoon. I watched the whole show right from my window, taking place right in my pine.
Earlier in the fall there were several mountain chickadees and a single black-capped chickadee in the area, but I have not seen or heard them since the freeze. I think that they are OK, however. Chickadees are tough. With the balmy weather we’ve had this month, they probably just disdain feeders. I would like to hear them calling, and even bought a premium type of sunflower seed that I thought might draw them back, but so far, no chick-a-dee-dee-dee.
There are occasional fly-bys by larger, nonfeeder species. I mentioned the merlin. There have also been both ravens and crows, several gulls, and a single red-tailed hawk. Assuming that my Rich Little-of-the-starling-world isn’t hiding somewhere, I frequently hear Canada Geese.
It’s night as I write this, and I can hear the neighborhood great horned owl pair calling back and forth. It’s breeding season for them and they’ve seemed to have a lot to talk about the last few weeks. One night, the deep, resonating hoot of the male’s voice was right outside my window, apparently right in my pine. That was a little disconcerting to awaken to.
The real clowns of the feeder set, however, have been a pair, a male and a female, of red-shafted flickers – I’ve ignored the official northern flicker title ever since I had a stray yellow-shafted flicker at my feeder last month. They really seem to want the suet, but have such a time getting any. The feeder is suspended, so naturally it swings rather freely in a breeze. With the impact of a flicker landing it becomes absolutely unstable, flinging the flicker forward from the feeder, foiling the flicker feeding frenzy.
They have now figured out how to gently jump from the closest branch without causing too much disturbance, but occasionally one will still be too aggressive and miss. At flicker feeding time, all the smaller birds retire to await calmer conditions.
Generally one member of the flicker pair is in the vicinity, usually checking out the bark of one of the other pines on the block. On three occasions, though, with no red-shafts in sight, a beautiful male yellow-shafted flicker has sneaked in to partake of the swinging suet. His nape-of-the-neck red crescent is unmistakable, as are his yellow shafts. He has been the most exciting find of the season, and my first yellow-shafted flicker west of the Great Plains.
Not being in the field has been tough, but what a blessing my extended feeder-family has been. I catch myself in idle watching far too often for all the things I need to get done at my desk. And I’ve spent too much on seed and suet. But what a pleasure it has been to get to know my neighbors better. What a lesson for a restless chaser like me, to sit and watch, hour after hour. I never knew I had the patience. I never knew I could enjoy feeder watching so much. I never realized how badly I’ve needed to slow down and enjoy what’s close at hand.