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The White-Breasted Nuthatch
A High-Spirited Companion - An All-Season Gift
"Little wing don't fly away, when the summer turns to fall. Don't you know some people say, winter is the best time of them all . . . winter is the best of all."
- Neil Young, Little Wing, from Hawks and Doves
Gift Your Home With Feathered Friends
Nesting boxes set about eight to 20 feet off the ground in the woods will provide a home for nuthatches. The box opening should be about 1 and 3/8 inches in diameter. The box can be set in the woods or where the woods edge up to grasslands, and in any case, away from significant human activity. These should be up by early March to get used this spring.
Outside my window, the snowflakes waft on a light breeze, the leftovers of a storm that came through last night. It left a couple of inches of soggy wet snow behind. The fresh white strikes against a cobalt morning sky, lit by bright sun. The flakes float lightly on the breeze in the early light like, the dust that wafts in my office in the angular light of morning, coming through the window in a warm and welcome way. The soggy snow softens all the sharp edges for the eye and the ear. The snow weighs heavily on my piñon-juniper woods. The piñon boughs bend under the weight; gravity pulls, and the snow falls from the branches en mass, and the limbs bounce back in stringy resistive wood. The sudden movement startles a white-breasted nuthatch from a hidden haunt he had taken to get out of the wind. He alights head down on a suet cake just out my window.
Some folks delight in spring migrant birds returning north to nest. It is a homecoming of sorts, and they are after all a harbinger of spring - that planet Earth is wobbling back into the vernal position - a signal of renewal. The birds are certainly a delight to watch. And I suppose you can't help but feel you're starting anew when the meadowlarks gurgle on a fence post with purpose or phoebes flit about deftly catching flies. Bewick's wrens will fire off serried song like hot sparks off a farrier's hot steel. But I don't have to wait for the remaining winter days to slowly peel away to have my spirits lifted by birds, not when I have white-breasted nuthatches taking up housekeeping outside my windows.
A few years ago I put up a dozen nest boxes in my piñon-juniper woods here in Santa Fe County. And white-breasted nuthatches being cavity nesters, they took to them like, well, a duck takes to water. That first nesting season they produced quite a crop of little ones. In autumn, when most of the other song birds got itchy feet, I wasn't disappointed. The white-breasted nuthatches stayed behind. They tough out the winters here, they haunt the woods the year-round. They never leave, and I am thankful for that. They keep house in my woods with two other year-round residents, the mountain chickadee and juniper titmouse. I can hear in my head their fuzzy sounding /chicka-dee-dee/ or clear three-note /whickity-whickty-whickity/. I see them all pretty regular, and I like them all, but it's the nuthatch I find most captivating.
These compact birds are five inches of energized bird flesh, not much bigger than a house sparrow, those gregarious and loquacious birds you so often see in restaurant parking lots. White-breasted nuthatches, well, they're a little more dignified than that, to go a begging for scraps of fries and buns. You will meet a nuthatch on a winter walk like an unexpected gift as they busy themselves inspecting every crook and crevice in a cottonwood and elm, or piñon and pine. Even as the mercury drops, their spirits stay high. They're agile climbers, and you're most likely to find them defying gravity hanging upside down, or circling a tree trunk in a head-first downward spiral in search of food. They deftly run on the bottom side of a branch looking more like a house fly than a bird. They're also called a "tree mouse" or a "devil downhead" for these agile antics.
Take pause and watch one. They carry a countenance of ingenuous inquisitiveness; they hack and hatchet at furrows in the bark, breaking off bits with their bill, gleaning larvae and spiders. They get their name from the habit of wedging nuts in tree bark, and hatching them open with their pointed little bill. They come to feeders, too, taking away seeds or suet. But they don't always eat their food immediately; they will store it away for a later day.
March is the fulcrum to spring, and come April, they will take an interest in the nest boxes and old woodpecker cavities and crannies and crooks made by windfalls and lightening. The male bird will say out loud his intent to call a tree home, but his nasally /yank-yank, yank/ is distinctive, but the song lacks all musical quality. They sing like you talk holding your nose. The males court a mate by feeding her, and they mate for life. Both soon-to-be parents line a cavity with tiny twigs, bark, fur and feathers. As a safeguard from predators, they have a curious habit of sweeping the nest cavity with crushed insects, maybe to mask their own scent from curious reptiles or mammals, but who knows.
This morning I delight in seeing an upside-down nuthatch steal away tiny morsels of suet in its little upturned beak. In a few months, a half-dozen tiny reddish-brown eggs hatch after two week of incubation. Two weeks after that, the young leave the nest.In short order, the young ones will scurry down a tree head-first, take pause, stick out their head at 90 degrees, give me a sideways quizzical glance and be off. But I know they won't be going far, and will stay behind for my benefit when summer turns to fall.
Craig Springer writes from Santa Fe County, New Mexico.
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