Birders' Eye View: As the bird world turns

For the last few weeks, I’ve stared out my window at feeders full of seed but mostly empty of birds. My faithful chickadees and house finches have been around, but they don’t eat that much. Where have all the cardinals, blue jays, titmice, and woodpeckers gone? Even the ear of corn I put out for the squirrels sits sadly uneaten in its holder.

“That Mother Nature is at it again,” I muttered to myself, taking in the bushes and trees loaded with berries, nuts, and seeds. Glancing around, I saw a cardinal snacking on beautyberries and a red-bellied woodpecker with a whole acorn clutched in his beak.

So I did what I do when the yard birding gets boring — head for the beach. As I walked past a brushy field, a fussy chatter from within a bush caught my attention. I made a series of hissing noises — what birders call pishing — and a dull brown bird with a perky tail popped up to find the source of the racket.

“Winter must be coming,” I thought to myself. “The house wrens are back.”

Wrens are small, active songbirds with short, rounded wings and thin, curved bills perfect for probing in crevices for tasty bugs. Most carry their tails in a “cocked” position. In North America, all nine species are boringly brown. The Carolina wren — our everyday, year-round representative of the species, is a rich, rusty-brown with a broad, white stripe above its eye. Like town criers, Carolina wrens broadcast the latest news from the bird world with a ringing “tea-kettle, tea-kettle, tea-kettle.”

Come fall, the Carolina wrens have to share space with their northern-nesting cousins, the house wrens. These slimmer, drabber wrens lack the distinctive eye stripe. In the spring, house wrens impress potential mates with a complex series of bubbling trills. In the winter, they chatter, and whine, scolding constantly like grumpy little fuss-budgets.

I continued down the path, only to be distracted by a mass of birds whirling and diving above my head. There were 50 – no 100 – no it had to be 500 – birds with gleaming white bellies and iridescent blue backs. Here was another sign of a changing bird world. The summer-nesting purple martins, barn swallows, and chimney swifts had punched their tickets for points south. These new arrivals, the tree swallows, don’t feel compelled to follow the insects to the tropics. They stay around all winter, eating bugs when they can get them, but also chowing down on berries and seeds from wax myrtles and other plants.

Fifty yards farther along, I heard a soft, nasal mewing. Peering into a leafy tree, I spied a pair of yellow-bellied sapsuckers playing a came of tree-trunk tag. One would land on a branch and peck a few times. The second bird then flew in to displace the first. Occasionally, the neighborhood bully mockingbird would dash in to chase off both the sapsuckers. These fall-and-winter-only woodpeckers specialize in drilling regular rows of holes in tree bark.

Then they lap up the sap that comes to the surface, and snack on the insects that stop by for a sweet treat

While I watched the sapsuckers, I noticed several small birds hopping around in the tree canopy. I found one lingering northern parula, but the rest of the birds were yellow-rumped warblers, familiarly known as “rumps” or “butter butts.” Like the tree swallows, this abundant winter resident — once called the myrtle warbler — also dines on wax myrtle berries.

“Tip, tip, tip,” they intoned monotonously.

“Forget the beach,” I decided, and headed for Fort Pulaski where I found Nelson’s, saltmarsh, and Savannah sparrows, sedge wrens, eastern meadowlarks, and a single northern harrier cruising low over the fields. When I see that (first of the season) American goldfinch, I’ll know that the bird world has really turned. Good birding.

Bird enthusiast Diana Churchill can be reached via email at birderseyeview@bellsouth.net.