True to their name, Carolina wrens are primarily southeastern birds who’ve expanded their range northward over the years. They’re resident now as far north as Ontario but are so sensitive to the cold that their populations plummet in harsh weather.

Pennsylvania birding data shows that Carolina wrens died back in the harsh winters of 1918, 1932-34, 1958, 1977 and 1994.  Earlier this month we had two very cold, snowy weeks with lows in the single digits and at least three inches of continuous snow cover.  Have the Carolina wrens survived?

Marcy Cunkelman’s have.  A pair of Carolina wrens claimed her Clarksburg yard as their own and she tells me they’ve made it through the worst.  I’m sure it’s because she provided them with the two things they need most in cold weather: food and shelter.

The food is her homemade peanut butter suet, a recipe she heard on Scott Shalaway’s radio program.  As Marcy says, the secret is real lard – no substitutes.  The recipe is variously attributed to Martha Sargent in Alabama and to Julie Zickefoose who published it on her blog.  If you’d like to try it, here it is:
No-melt Suet Recipe … (also called Zick Dough)
Melt 1 cup of lard and 1 cup of crunchy peanut butter in microwave or kettle.  Stir, then add:
     2 cups of quick cook oats
     2 cups yellow cornmeal
    1 cup of flour
     1/3 cup of sugar
Pour into square containers and freeze.

And what do Marcy’s wrens do for shelter?   They use this hanging basket. 

The side of her house and the greenery provide a wind break and the wrens have made home improvements by adding leaves, gray moss and the coconut fibers from Marcy’s plant liners.

It’s a delicious, cozy territory.  Quite a kingdom for the wrens.

(photo by Marcy Cunkelman)

I noticed this when I took a walk on the Montour Trail on Saturday and was pleasantly surprised by bright sunshine and a lot of activity among three tufted titmice.  They attracted my attention when I heard a high-pitched “seeeee” and saw them hopping, bowing, spreading their tails and showing off their rusty flanks to each other.

What were they doing?  The answer required some research.

Tufted titmice don’t migrate.  Instead they stay on their home range with their mate, and sometimes their young, all winter.  The family groups don’t fight among themselves but a neighboring male may test the boundaries.  This makes the local pair very agitated and they all hop and chase.  During territorial disputes male titmice make a high-pitched whistle so that’s what caught my attention.

The dispute was important to the three birds who flitted over my head, oblivious to my presence.  Eventually they worked out their differences and the males went back to their homes to sing “Peter, Peter, Peter.”

Listen for their songs as the month progresses and you, too, can anticipate spring.

(photo by Bobby Greene)

I watched the preview last weekend and was wowed by these tiny jewels.  Did you know that hummingbirds are the smallest warm-blooded animal on earth?  That they only occur in the Western Hemisphere?  That their wings provide lift from both sides?  That they’re related to swifts?   I learned a lot, and that wasn’t even the best part.

Filmed in high definition, high speed video the producers slowed down the action so you can see the hummingbirds’ wingbeats.  There was slow motion footage of hummingbirds courting, eating and fighting (imagine that!).  The closeups are so close that you can see the claws on the hummingbird’s toes as he grasps the edge of a flower.  They recorded the 60 mph courtship dive of the male Anna’s hummingbird and the waving tail feathers of the rare Marvelous Spatuletail.  Beautiful and amazing!

The producers traveled far and wide to film these gorgeous birds.  You might even recognize the people in the film including hummingbird bander Nancy Newfield of Louisiana.  But the birds themselves are the stars. 

Click on the photo to watch previews of the show.  Then tune in at 8:00pm EST on Sunday, January 10 to see Hummingbirds: Magic in the Air.   In Pittsburgh watch it on WQED or check your local PBS schedule for exact times in your area.

(photo of a Velvet-purple Coronet from Nature: Hummingbirds: Magic in the Air)

When I told my husband this was the Best Bird on my outings he remarked that it has the sort of name you’d invent for fiction.  Imagine a British comedy in which a bird watcher (a.k.a. “twitcher”) arrives for tea and discusses the bird he’d like to see on his trip to America.  “Yellow-bellied sapsucker,” he says.  Right.  Everyone laughs.

Weird as it seems this woodpecker is well named.  Mostly black, white and red he has a yellow wash on his belly and he eats sap.

Sapsuckers drill horizontal rows of small holes in tree bark, then return to sip the sap that wells up in them.  On my walks in Virginia they chose southern pines for this meal.  In Pittsburgh they seem to prefer maples.

Sap sipping alone would not have won my Best Bird award last weekend.  What impressed me was the cavalier way in which one of them ate poison ivy berries, tossing them in the air and catching them in his beak. 

Pretty cool bird … or was he imaginary?

(photo by Chuck Tague)

Since midsummer we’ve lost more than five hours of sunlight so there’s not much reason to sing.  The migrant songbirds have left and only our locals (chickadees and cardinals) and some winter visitors (dark-eyed juncoes) remain.  Most of them have nothing to say.

My only hope for birdsong is at dawn and the singer is the bird pictured here - the Carolina wren.

According to the range maps, Carolina wrens don’t migrate but I wonder if they change territories in the winter.  What explains the new scuffles and song duels they engaged in in October?  Why does each wren now sing briefly at dawn? 

I hear them pipe up one after the other.  “I’m here,” says the wren down the street.  “I’m here,” says another across the ballpark.  “I’m here,” says a third up the hill.  After this brief exchange of greetings they fall silent. 

You have to be out early to hear birdsong this month.

(photo by Marcy Cunkelman)

Dead trees are treasure troves for woodpeckers too, and in the bird world they wield the ax.  Though the leaves have fallen the weather is still warm, the larvae are still active inside the bark, and the woodpeckers can hear them.

This weekend I found a pileated woodpecker excavating a dead tree in Schenley Park.  Among birds, the pileated’s beak is about as close as you can come to an ax.  The bird itself is the size of a crow with a beak 1.5 to 2 inches long.  That may sound small but his beak hits the wood at 13-15 miles per hour so the woodpecker experiences 10G’s of force at each blow.  

It would kill you or me to slam our heads against trees but the woodpecker’s head is designed for the work.  His neck absorbs the impact and his brain is cushioned by a network of flexible cartilage and spongy air-filled bone.  His tongue is very long for probing the openings he creates – so long that it retracts inside to the back of his skull.  It’s the right equipment for chopping trees.

Keep a lookout this month for pileated woodpeckers.  November is the month for the ax.

(photo by Dick Martin)

The answer is a surprise.  It turns out that some yellow-billed cuckoos raise a second family in the thorn forests of western Mexico.  And so do orchard orioles, hooded orioles, yellow-breasted chats and Cassin’s vireos.

Called “migratory double breeding” the discovery was stunning.  Scientists knew of just two Old World species who did this on their journey north but no birds had been found to do it in the western hemisphere and none anywhere were known to double-breed on the southbound trip.

Gathering the evidence was truly detective work.  Scientists were in the thorn forests in July and August, expecting to study the molt cycles of migratory songbirds.  Instead they found males singing on territory, female birds with established brood patches and no young birds as they’d expect if the families had already bred in the forest.  The clincher was when they found the nests and eggs.

If five songbird species are double-breeding in the thorn forest, why did it take so long to discover it?  July and August are forbidding months in western Mexico.  It’s the monsoon season with temperatures at 100 degrees, humidity at 100% and lots of biting insects.  People have only recently begun to farm the region, leading to a decline in thorn forest habitat.  Interestingly, the habitat decline coupled with migratory double-breeding may explain the decline of yellow-billed cuckoos in the western U.S.

So like the story of a man who has two families half a continent apart, these birds must hurry to squeeze in a second family in western Mexico, then finish their migration to tropical Central and South America.  That’s what the rush is all about.

Read more about the discovery in this Science Daily article.

(photo by Chuck Tague)

Sometimes you can’t see a bird’s traits until they’re frozen in a photograph.

Look closely at this American goldfinch browsing on Sam Leinhardt’s zinnias.  Even though only the top of her head is visible you can see both of her eyes. 

Goldfinches are small birds about 4.5 inches long.  At this size they are easy prey for owls, cats and hawks so they have to be wary.  What better way to be prepared than to have peripheral vision above and behind so you can see danger coming, even when your head is down feeding on seeds. 

Many small birds have this trait, but how did they get it?  Indirectly, from the relentless pressure of predators.  Goldfinches who couldn’t see danger coming were easy prey while those with wide peripheral vision survived.  The survivors had “kids” with the same trait.

So, yes, she really does have eyes in the back of her head, just like all her relatives.

(photo by Sam Leinhardt)

I used to think blue jays didn’t migrate because their range map shows them as year round in North America.  Because I see them all year, I assumed I was observing the same individuals.

That was until one May morning at Lake Erie when I saw a long line of jays flying northeast along the shore.  Chuck Tague told me they were flying to Canada but the lake was a big barrier.

As we watched, the jays turned north over the lake and hit a wall of air none of us could see.   One by one they battled the invisible barrier.  Finally they broke formation and flew back over land where they regrouped and again proceeded in a line, following the shore.

Other than similar observations at migration hot spots, blue jay migration is subtle if it occurs at all.  Blue jays don’t have to leave home if they can store enough food for the winter.  When they do decide to migrate, they travel during the day in small groups of 10 to 30 birds.  It often doesn’t look like they’re migrating because the jays fly one at a time from tree to tree, a behavior that resembles foraging.

This fall blue jays are leaving Canada in droves because their winter food supply is low – too few acorns, beechnuts and hazelnuts.

I’m sure they’ll enjoy their time Pittsburgh.  We have a bumper crop of acorns.

(photo by Chuck Tague)

Yesterday morning I stepped out on the front porch just after 6:00am to check the weather.  It was my first morning home from Maine and I was a little surprised that I didn’t need a jacket and the sun hadn’t come up yet.  What was I thinking!  Maine is certainly colder and it’s so far east that the sun rises there 45 minutes earlier than it does in Pittsburgh.  I had nearly an hour to wait for dawn.

As I gazed at the waning moon I heard a sound like spring peepers coming from above.  I knew the distinct solo “peeps” were the nocturnal flight calls of migrating thrushes, but which ones?

The pre-dawn sky was clear with a light wind from the north.  The birds kept coming with hardly a pause.  I rushed indoors to get my binoculars but it was too dark to see the birds.  In my excitement I forgot to count the sounds so all I can tell you is that they passed by steadily for 20 minutes.  My guess is there were several hundred of them. 

Later indoors, I checked my birdsong CDs and the Internet for samples of nocturnal flight calls.  I couldn’t find any audio examples – only voice-prints – but I looked through descriptions of various thrushes’ calls and found this at eNature’s Sibley Guide for the Swainson’s thrush:  “Flight call a mostly clear, level, emphatic heep or queev reminiscent of Spring Peeper (treefrog) call.”

So that’s who they were. 

I heard Swainson’s thrushes migrating this morning, too.  I wish I could have seen them.

(photo by Chuck Tague)