I know I always yell at you to get outside to look for birds, but apparently, we now live in Buffalo, New York, and will be waist deep in snow until May. Throw in the frigid temps, and even I have to admit that this may be a week to hunker down and watch the feeders. The feeders may be where all the birds are, anyway. Some of the bay beaches are iced out a half mile like it’s Point Barrow, Alaska, and the songbirds that prefer feeding on the ground are swallowing their pride and hitting the feeders due to the snow.
The suet is my most productive offering when it comes to some of the more interesting birds, like warblers and bluebirds. Yes, we have lots of bluebirds on the Cape in winter, and they readily visit suet and mealworm feeders. My bluebirds seem to follow a couple of flickers around to clean up all the suet chunks on the ground after the flicker has hammered away at the cake. Whenever I see one of the neighborhood flickers on the suet, the bluebirds invariably show up a minute or two later to feast on the bite sized crumbs that fall during the messy chiseling of the big woodpeckers.
I also see Pine Warblers, at least five, and a couple of Yellow-rumped Warblers at the suet every day. Most warbler species headed to the tropics ages ago, but these hardy species can survive a New England winter by eating fruit and seeds in addition to whatever insects they can find, but prefer suet at feeding stations. Apparently a couple of Pine Warblers that ended up in Colorado, well west of their normal range, ate tree sap and even bean sprouts from a dumpster to survive the harsh winter. I hear their parents actually had money and they were just eating from the dumpster to protest our decadent consumer society.
The rarest bird I’ve been seeing is a Chipping Sparrow, only considered rare because of the season – most migrate out of the region for the winter. They prefer the white millet that makes up the less expensive seed mixes, making them a cheap date. But millet can also help you reel in some real premium level rare birds like Painted Buntings – at least two or three of these southern seedeaters seem end up at feeders on the Cape every winter. A fully technicolor male has been visiting a feeder in Brewster since late fall, and a female-type, which are all yellow-green, just showed up in a yard in Dennis over the weekend.
A couple of lucky birders, one in Harwich and another in Mashpee, have Baltimore Orioles visiting their feeders this week. Most head to Central America, but a few winter here due to either extreme toughness or extreme laziness, which they prefer to call “migration aversion disorder”. You should also watch for Orange-crowned Warblers on your suet. These are much rarer than the other winter warblers, but have been visiting feeders in Wellfleet, Orleans, Mashpee, and West Tisbury recently.
As I always say, you never know what may be out there, even in your own yard, so stay alert. A woman in Montreal recently discovered Canada’s first record of European Robin when she was taking out the trash. She was enough of a birder to know the call she heard was something out of the ordinary, and recorded a quick phone video to seal the ID. Within a day, hundreds of people were flocking to see this lost little bird at a nondescript row house near the St. Lawrence river.
I don’t know about you, but I think this is one of my best pieces ever. I don’t want to jinx it, but I feel like “Guy talks about birds he sees in his yard” is a shoo-in for a Peabody Award. Fingers crossed!
