Mid-winter Feeder Migratory Birds

There is a researcher at Mt. Holyoke College in South Hadley who captures the black-capped chickadees visiting the feeders in her yard and bands them. This way she can identify individuals and learn how they interact. She can also tell how many different birds come to the feeders, and surprisingly there are quite a few.

I usually count four or five chickadees at my feeder, but based on the banding studies, there are probably many more individuals that visit. At any one time we probably see only a small fraction of our feeder visitors. Likely they make the rounds in the neighborhood, comparing the fare.

When the recent snowstorms finally arrived, more birds should have come to the feeders, but at first the opposite seemed to be true. Was this because birds are scarce in general this winter, as the low numbers on the Christmas counts indicated? Or did many small birds succumb to the snow and cold?

Now in the last week, more birds have been coming to feed. There are more than a dozen tree sparrows at any one time, eight white-throated sparrows, three song sparrows, about twenty juncos, and even one field sparrow for the first time all winter.

Have these birds been in the neighborhood all winter, and are finally driven to the feeder by the dwindling or covering of wild food supplies? There is another possibility. Perhaps some birds migrate in the middle of winter, and these increases are new birds that had been wintering much farther north, and have newly arrived here.

We know that some species do this, such as the rough-legged hawk, which is a large obvious species that was clearly not around in December or early January, but now is being reported from quite a few places. However, for small common birds, we need more banding and research to solve the mystery.

This mid-winter movement of birds might explain why there were fewer birds after the snow first arrived. Possibly many of the birds of December were prompted by the snow to pack off and move to New Jersey or coastal Connecticut. Then it took some time for a new group of arrivals from farther north to find the local feeders.

We are talking only about the species that actually do migrate at all, such as the sparrows mentioned above. The sedentary species, such as cardinals and woodpeckers and house sparrows, probably do not wander that far. They live or die with the food they can find in their chosen homes.

This is tough on a species such as the Carolina wren, which some people are now hosting for the first time all winter. There are only a few of these wrens here on the northern limit of their range, and they are in a precarious position since they need bare ground to find their food. If they don't have that, they must subsist on seed and suet at a feeder.

Migratory species benefit by the instinct to move around, and none are more movable than the finches. There are goldfinches at my feeders, usually fifty at a time. A single redpoll came twice in the last week, but at some feeders there are flocks of redpolls.

A tour of Blandford and Granville last weekend was only fruitful near houses that fed the birds. One house had a flock of fifty redpolls clustering to eat in a tight bunch, and flushing all at once as well. A friend's house had another fifty redpolls and we watched them pack in tight to feed on the ground beneath the feeders.

We did not watch closely enough, for we suddenly realized there were two pine siskins among the redpolls. That was an unexpected surprise, for most of these finches moved through our area in October on the way farther south.

Another treat were the two red-breasted nuthatches that came in to grab a seed and flutter off in the manner of chickadees. Unlike their white-breasted cousins, the red-breasted nuthatch is a migrant species, some years moving south to us and sometimes moving farther south away from us. There is a vast variety of behaviors and adaptations that birds exhibit, and it is a source of mystery and fascination for those who watch them.

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