We Gather Together for Peanuts and Suet Cakes

It's the week before Thanksgiving, and even in my backyard my wild neighbors are joining in the theme of "gathering in." Since I participate in Project FeederWatch, a citizen- science project of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology (See "references" section for information), I spend much of my weekend time watching out my back windows counting the birds and serving as witness to all the dramas, small and large, which daily occur there.

My yard has long hosted families of fox squirrels, but during the summer months I seldom see them except at the bird bath, where they come for fresh water. Occasionally one of the females will visit the bird feeders for a quick and easy meal, especially if she is nursing, but otherwise they feast on nuts, fruit and berries elsewhere in the yard and neighborhood. Now that winter is coming, the squirrels are back to making daily visits to the bird feeder, where they stuff their cheeks with sunflower seeds to cache back at their dens, called dreys, which they build from interwoven twigs and line with moss. I've watched the squirrels harvest both twigs and moss from my apple trees, and although they spend much of their days in my yard, their drey is located somewhere else.

Northern bushtits, dressed in Thanksgiving's pilgrim-gray feathers, are also regular visitors to my yard. During the summer months they visited in family groups of four or five. As autumn set in the family groups joined together, and now the flock which visits my yard, hanging off of the tips of branches eating microscopic bugs and crowding congenially onto my suet feeder, numbers four dozen or more.

Recent arrivals include the lovely varied thrush, which is similar in size to an American robin, and the same gray, brown and russet coloring, but on the thrush the russet-orange is painted all over its body, in stripes and dramatic crescents. The thrushes make Thanksgiving feasts of the windfall apples from our ancient trees, or sometimes on the berries from our English holly.

This season I've also had regular visits from a pair of red-breasted nuthatches. I've occasionally seen these birds in my yard, once or twice a month, but this autumn they have definitely tightened their foraging territory with my backyard at the center. Gregarious and vocal birds, their distinctive "yank-yank-yank" call is audible all day long. According to Kenn Kaufman's "Lives of North American Birds," my primary source of information on bird life and behavior (at least until Santa picks up on my rather thinly-veiled hints and brings me David Sibley's "Guide to Bird Life and Behavior" to me for Christmas), the red-breasted nuthatch (Sitta canadensis) feeds by foraging up and down tree trunks and branches looking for spiders and bugs in the summer, seeds and nuts in the winter. In my yard, the nuthatches will eat sunflower seeds from either the platform feeder or the hanging tube feeder, and it sometimes visits the suet feeder, but their favorite food by far is peanuts. Yesterday I hung a peanut feeder, which I always do in the winter as a way of providing some extra calories to the smaller birds as the temperatures start to drop. The nuthatches immediately discovered it. From daylight to dusk they make repeated visits to the peanut feeder, pulling peanut chips out and weighing them in their beaks, rejecting those which are too small. They then fly to the apple trees with the chosen chip, and cache it in a crevice of the bark, where they can retrieve it later. Opportunistic scrub jays, ever present in the yard, have quickly learned that if they watch the nuthatches they can make a quick meal off of the discarded peanut chips which the nuthatches drop to the ground below the feeder, and they've also learned that they can go right in and harvest the chips which the nuthatches have cached in the tree bark. It will be my job, I suppose, to make sure that there is enough food for all this winter, even for the jays.

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