VERMONT'S BEAUTIFUL WINTER BIRDS - Part One: At Your Feeder

Winter in Vermont can be dark, cold and even dreary. And lots of the birds we enjoyed spring, summer and fall have deserted us! Right now, they are basking in warm sunshine and gentle breezes in southern U.S. or South America or the Caribbean. But lots of birds don't leave the north country. 

Everybody knows Black-capped Chickadees! They’re incredibly cute birds, and they’re regulars at backyard feeders. 

Black-capped Chickadee with unsalted peanut

Chickadees need lots of nutritious food to keep them going through the long cold winter - so they take hundreds and hundreds of seeds and nuts and store them under bits of bark or in tree cavities. Amazingly, these little birds remember every single one of their many hiding places!

Both White-breasted and Red-breasted Nuthatches - the "upside down birds" - also happily come to get seeds or peanuts. 

White-breasted Nuthatch at peanut feeder

The red-breasted ones are smaller – petite, delicate little creatures.

Red-breasted Nuthatch enjoying peanut butter smeared on a log

This Tufted Titmouse visits our feeders regularly. You can recognize titmice by the gray backs, unusually big eyes, and the little crest, or tuft, of feathers on their heads.  

Blue Jays love seeds and nuts too – to eat today and to store for later.  We’ve watched a Blue Jay pick up as many as ten unshelled peanuts at one time.

Downy and Hairy Woodpeckers look almost identical, but Downies are smaller and their bills are noticeably smaller in comparison to their heads. The males of both species have a bit of red on their heads.

Pileated Woodpeckers are the biggest! From one wingtip to the other is almost thirty inches. Ants are the most favorite food of Pileated Woodpeckers. They find ants in rotting wood, so we often see big deep trenches in trees where the huge woodpeckers have been feasting.  

Vermont has many birds that don’t store food. These birds have to eat pretty much all day long, every single day, during our cold winters. 

 

This little American Tree Sparrow eats about a third of its weight in seeds every single day. That’s like an adult human chowing down on over 50 pounds of food in one day!  Tree Sparrows nest and raise young on the far northern Canadian tundra. They come down here to Vermont for winter the way some Vermont humans head south to Florida – Ahhhh! So nice and warm here!

We can see other kinds of sparrows in Vermont. White-throated Sparrows are well-named. 

Their white throats are always noticeable! There are two kinds: one with black and white stripes on the top of their heads – like this one - and one with brown and tan stripes – and you might see both at your feeders. 

Dark-eyed Juncos are really pleasing little birds, with their neat dark gray, crisp white, and little pink bills. Juncos are more often seen on the ground under feeders than on the feeders themselves.

Female juncos are more brown than gray.

Juncos as a species show an incredible amount of variation: black, brown, dark gray, lighter grays and browns, even splotchy or mottled. But if you see a junco in flight, you can identify it by the white outer tail feathers.

Northern Cardinals glow in the winter, without all that distracting summertime foliage – like this female …

and this male.

The soft colors of Mourning Doves look beautiful against a snow-covered landscape. Doves don’t store food like chickadees or nuthatches, so they have to eat large amounts of seeds every single day all winter long. 

We humans can help by leaving dead flower heads standing, instead of cutting them down, because those flower heads are full of tiny, healthy seeds.

American Goldfinches also chow down on flower seeds and grass seeds. In the summer, males are brilliant yellow, black and white. But by the time the first snow falls, both male and female goldfinches have much quieter colors. 

House Finch males are streaky birds with some areas of red-orange. The females don’t have the brighter color. 

Purple Finch males look like “sparrows dipped in raspberry juice”. 

Females are similar to House Finch females except that they’re darker and have heavy whitish eyebrows. 

Every few years, Vermont feeders might get visited by Pine Siskins. Siskins look sort of like streaky goldfinches with sharp, pointed bills and short notched tails. They have a little bit of yellow edging on their wings and tail. 

In addition to all those beautiful winter birds, a few other kinds sometimes come down from Canada to join us during the winter.

This year is a great year for Evening Grosbeaks. 

These are big, chunky birds with thick necks and thick, powerful, conical bills. The males are yellow, white and black, with pale bills and distinctive yellow eyebrow stripes. Females are gray and black and pale gold.

Every two or three years, backyard feeders in Vermont can be overrun with hundreds of Common Redpolls. 

These chubby little cuties can survive temperatures down to 65 degrees below zero (Fahrenheit). 

During winter, they sometimes tunnel into the snow to stay warm at night. One early morning a few winters ago, I noticed the foot-deep snow on the barn roof was heaving and shaking. As I watched, eighteen little redpolls emerged, shook off the snow, and flew down to the feeders.

Both sexes have the little red spot on the top of their heads that gave them their name. Males also have pink “bibs” – like this. 

I found this little bird lying upside down on the frozen ground one morning, apparently dead. I brought him inside, put him in a box, and left him alone for an hour or so – and then heard fluttering inside the box. I took the box outside, held the little bird on my palm, and was delighted to see him make an energetic jump and fly off across the yard. My guess is that the redpoll had either flown against the house or been hit by a predator such as a hawk, had fallen to the ground, stunned, and had almost frozen to death. It just needed time in a warm place to recover.

Vermonters should also be on the lookout for Waxwings in winter. These beautiful and gregarious birds chow down on sumac berries, mountain ash, wild grapes and ornamental fruit trees. 

Cedar Waxwing

The two species look superficially alike, but Bohemian Waxwings are heftier – sort of like Cedar Waxwings on steroids. One excellent field mark for Bohemian Waxwings is the brick red color under the tail.

Bohemian Waxwing

And some years, Vermonters get to see good-sized flocks of Pine Grosbeaks. They are usually found where there are ornamental crab apple trees. By late winter, the small fruits are withered and soft – and apparently delicious to Pine Grosbeaks, like this handsome male! 

A feeding flock often stays near a single tree or a group of trees until all of the fruit is consumed and the trees are completely bare.

Many of the Pine Grosbeaks that visit Vermont in the winter aren’t that gorgeous pink. They’re either females - or immature males, like this one, birds that fledged the summer before. 

Backyard bird feeders sometimes attract big birds that eat small birds. The most common is the Sharp-shinned Hawk, like the intent and focused bird in this amazing photo from right here in Jericho. 

Sharp-shinned Hawk photo by Mandy Applin

Birds like this have to work hard for their meals. The smaller birds are always alert, and they let each other know when there's a predator in the area. 

Sharp-shinned Hawk at our feeder

Cooper’s Hawks look very similar to the Sharp-shinned Hawk. Both species used to be birds of the deep forest but they have discovered that backyard feeders are like smorgasbords for raptors – and they’re now seen small towns, suburbs and even cities. This big female caught three Mourning Doves at our feeders on three consecutive mornings.

Cooper's Hawk

(Northern Goshawks are the third member of that same family. They’re bigger and grayer than Cooper’s – and much rarer, but they do sometimes haunt backyards.) 

And, finally, our feeders sometimes attract another kind of big bird – one that excites and delights almost everyone!

Imagine that you’re a Barred Owl. You live by catching mice or voles or moles, or maybe a red squirrel from time to time. In winter, all these little creatures are running around in tunnels under the snow. But you have unbelievably good hearing, so good that you can hear where a mouse is, even under many inches of snow.

Barred Owl

BUT – Now imagine that the snow is covered with a layer of ice. You hear the mouse with your awesome owl hearing, you drop down with your sharp talons extended, but you can’t break through the ice quickly enough. And the mouse escapes. In winters where there’s a very deep snow cover or when there’s a layer of ice, owls can starve to death.

Barred Owls have figured out that small rodents, like mice, sometimes dig themselves out of their tunnels so they can pick up dropped seeds around backyard feeders. So the owls show up too, waiting in nearby trees.  

Near-starvation must have driven this beautiful Barred Owl to catch a rabbit, which is very big prey for a bird that usually swallows its meals whole. 

There are LOTS of feeder birds during Vermont winters! Stay tuned for the next post: all about Vermont's beautiful winter birds that are almost always found away from backyard feeders.

text by Maeve, most of the photos by Bernie