With the arrival of numbers of juncos this week, and the increase in layers required for outdoor living, we may have to admit that our beach days are mostly in the rear-view mirror at this point. But fret not, as some fun northern birds have been showing up to ease our transition to winter. They include some particularly erratic and unexpected winter wanderers, as well as some of this bird guy’s favorite species. So let’s talk about these surprise birds, and check in on the annual winter finch forecast, including what the early indicators are here on the Cape and islands.
On Saturday, a bird walk sponsored jointly by the South Shore Bird Club and the Cape Cod Bird Club met up at Sandy Neck in Barnstable. This is much better than the old days, when rival bird clubs would meet up for rumbles, wherein birders would swing binoculars at each other like nunchucks in an old Bruce Lee film - it wasn’t pretty. In any case, this trip was non-violent, and also very successful, bird-wise, with 56 species tallied between beach, dune, and thicket. Among them was a coveted winter finch found munching cones in the pitch pines near the gatehouse – the White-winged Crossbill.
These mysterious, peripatetic songbirds are never expected, but hoped for each winter. The finch forecast for this year, an actual thing put together by biologist Tyler Hoar from a network of other finch fans plus foresters reporting on cone and other seed crops across the northern forests, said there were good numbers of this species in southeastern Canada over the summer thanks to a strong crop of spruce cones. I suspect the strong, recent northeastern winds brought a few down from Nova Scotia.
White-winged Crossbills are House Finch-sized but with a bigger head, plus that crazy crossed bill – it looks like a flaw but it’s actually a feature. Those crossed tips are for extracting conifer seeds from cones – they can reportedly eat 3000 seeds a day. Males are a bright pinkish red with black wings and strongly contrasting white wing bars. Europeans call them “Two-barred Crossbills” which I prefer. Like Red Crossbills, they can breed in any month of the year if cone crops are good, and will wander east, west, north, and south to find food when local cone crops are depleted. Listen for their calls which can either sound like, or this one birders call the typewriter call.
So it’s time to check your feeders for wandering winter finches. You might hit the bird lottery get a crossbill, but right now you’re much more likely to see their similarly spruce- oriented cousin the Pine Siskin. Looking like a streaky goldfinch with yellow wing-patches, these more regular fall and winter visitors have been arriving in good numbers the last two weeks, with flocks up to 20 or more at the feeders of a lucky few, plus bigger flocks up to 80 in Truro and Provincetown. I have been hearing their calls overhead whenever I spend significant time outside lately.
I didn’t even get to mention the Rough-legged Hawks, the honorary winter finch of the raptors, that have turned up in Sandwich and Provincetown recently - hopefully more are on the way and I can get to them another week. Ditto the rest of the winter finch forecast, which covers a bunch more species. But that can wait. Right now I need to work on my binocular swinging skills - I’m hoping to make bird club rumbles a thing again.
