It's a winter wonderland!

The snow kept me from going to work today, so I got an unexpected day at
home, and I've tried to keep track of the birds to report them to the
Cornell backyard bird project. You can really see interesting stuff when
you take the time to watch the birds in your own yard.

1) There is at least one Pileated Woodpecker that hangs out in the heavily
wooded ravine behind us. I noticed one in a dead maple a few minutes ago
and put the bins on it. In the binocular field with the Pileated there were
4 flickers and a Downy! The Downy was foraging very close to the others,
but none of the flickers was moving, and it looked as if they were just
hanging there watching the Pileated. The Pileated was really whacking the
tree, knocking off huge chunks of dead wood, and I could see where it had
been working, literally deconstructing the tree. There was about 8" of snow
in the yard this morning, and up to 4 flickers have been steadily visiting
the two suet feeders. I looked out at the same scene 5 minutes later, and
all birds were gone.

2) Steller's Jays are pretty smart, but they're bird-brains when all is said
and done. We feed them peanuts, and they're used to picking them from the
back lawn when we throw a handful out of the window. This morning up to 5
jays visited, and I started throwing out peanuts one by one onto the snow.
Normally they swoop down and carry them away immediately, but these birds
would follow the path of the peanut, then swerve away from the snow. They
obviously weren't willing to land on it, and I don't know whether it was
because of their aversion to the snow or because the peanuts sank in about
an inch. The nuts were plainly visible from above, and each one left a
conspicuous hole in the snow. Yet the jays *could not* figure out how to
get them, although it should have been easy for one to land on the snow and
pick the peanut out of the hole. I kept throwing peanuts, including in an
area where the snow was a bit harder so they stayed on the top, and one jay
started getting those peanuts. It took what was probably the same bird
another hour to finally start landing on the snow and pulling them out, and
as I write this, there is one jay perched out there waiting for me to feed
it, not even learning from the "smart" one that there is a treasure trove of
peanuts in the snow (a few dozen still lie there in cold storage).

Bernd Heinrich wrote that the ravens he studied, although very smart for
birds, seemed unwilling to try anything new (they eventually did so, but he
could see how nervous it made them). Familiarity breeds content in birds
(and probably most animals), and experimentation is attempted with
trepidation.

3) A half-dozen starlings visited the suet, and I was quite impressed that
the majority of them were in full breeding plumage, with pale tips worn off
the body feathers, bright yellow bills, and at least a few males with much
blue at the bill base.

WOW - just after I wrote that, the Pileated came to one of our suet feeders
and hung there awkwardly pecking the suet; I think it got some before it
flew back up into the trees. We've never had one right in the yard in 9
years of living here (only in the last year has there been one resident in
the ravine)! In this case, I guess the Pileated was watching the flickers.

Dennis Paulson
--
Netta Smith and Dennis Paulson
1724 NE 98 St.
Seattle, WA 98115