The Nature of Things

By the first of March, it seemed that most of our winter visitor birds had left the area. No more Rufous Hummingbirds . No more American Goldfinches . No more Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers or Orange-crowned Warblers . No more Chipping...oh, wait, what is that?  Over the weekend, I looked up to see a Chipping Sparrow perched on the grape vine in my backyard. It didn't stay there long but flew over to one of my feeders and began to have lunch. Usually when I see one chippie, there are several around, but this time I only saw this one. Likewise, I thought all the Pine Siskins had absconded, but no! Here's one perched in my redbud tree on Sunday and I later saw four of them at my feeders. I even heard an American Goldfinch in the pine trees next door. As I thought about it, it seemed likely to me that all of these birds had spent the winter farther south and that I am seeing them now as they head north. I do think that most of the winter birds that spent the season in my yard have a...

Here we are in almost mid-January and I can just about count the hours of sunshine that we've had this month on the fingers of my two hands. It's a gray, dreary, foggy, misty, rainy, chilly, cloud-covered month of depressing sameness so far. The only suns that my garden has seen lately are these two. This Talavera sun hangs on the fence in the sitting area in the front yard, under my beloved red oak tree. This metal sun overlooks my backyard garden and brings a bit of cheery color to these gray days. Winter has, in fact, arrived here at long last. Our daytime temperatures are in the 40 degrees F., a bit too chilly to be entirely comfortable sitting outside for long periods. On the night of January 7, we finally had a REAL frost when the thermometer hit 30 degrees F. That's still our low temperature for the season so far. But if winter has finally come to my yard, the birds most definitely have not. In past winters, by mid-January this feeder in my front yard would have bee...

It was just over a week ago that I participated in the annual mid-winter census of birds known as the Great Backyard Bird Count. During the weekend over which the count occurred, my backyard and my bird feeders were covered in birds, especially our winter visitors, the American Goldfinches. It was common to see the finch feeders carrying at least thirty of the little birds in their greenish winter feathers as they gobbled up my nyger seeds. I was refilling the nyger seed feeders on a daily basis. In addition to the thirty or so on those feeders, there were even more of the birds on the black oil sunflower seed feeders and on the ground under the feeders picking up fallen seeds. A flock of more than 100 birds would fly up when I ventured too close. But a few days ago, all of that changed. I looked up one day to find that there were no birds on the nyger feeders and the seed levels hadn't gone down for a couple of days. I looked around the yard and found that there were still a few ...

We call them winter finches. They are little songbirds that spend their summers in the boreal forests of Canada and north woods of the United States and then move southward to spend winters. Some of them make it all the way to the Gulf Coast. The movements of winter finches , like the movements of most birds, are related to finding food. In years when there is a heavy crop of seeds, nuts, and berries in the north, relatively few of the little birds travel very far to the south. It is not the cold of winter that they flee. It is lack of food. As long as they have a sufficient supply of food they can survive the cold. When the food crops fail or are less than normal, the lower 48 states can expect to see irruptions of birds such as Common and Hoary Redpolls, Evening Grosbeaks, Purple Finches, and Pine Siskins, as well as some of their fellow travelers like Red-breasted Nuthatches and Bohemian Waxwings. Those are very good years for birders throughout the country. Now, of all these winte...