Tag: bird feeding

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Cottage Life

How to protect hummingbirds during a spring cold snap

By spencerseesbirds/Shutterstock

However much we want spring to come, it often drags its feet. But no matter our frustration with reluctant above-zero temps, imagine a tiny Anna’s hummingbird, the only species that waits winter out in its territory along the west coast of North America, delighted to return to a favourite feeder only to find that sweet nectar encased in ice and completely inaccessible. Hummingbirds can consume half their body weight in sugar daily and have the highest metabolism of any warm-blooded animals on earth. With most of their food sources unavailable to them in the winter, they need that food.

Cottage Q&A: Feeding hummingbirds

The unpredictable weather this time of year has prompted a few wildlife groups to ask bird lovers to carefully monitor their hummingbird feeders. “These long winters are hard for Anna’s hummingbirds,” says Jackie McQuillan, the support centre manager with the Wildlife Rescue Association of BC on Burnaby Lake. “All of the other hummingbirds take what I would call the easier route and fly south for the winter,” she says, “but these birds, since about the 1940s, have stuck around the Lower Mainland and other areas of southern B.C.” Researchers theorize that various flowering invasive plant species provided food sources into cooler months, which kept the Anna’s hummingbirds from heading south with their avian associates. Whatever the reason, the hardy little birds stay put. And these days, many Anna’s hummingbirds rely on feeders as a winter food source.

How to photograph hummingbirds

McQuillan urges anyone with a feeder to commit to keeping it filled and paying particular attention during cold snaps to ensure that feeders are accessible. The easiest thing, McQuillan says, is to have two feeders and swap them out for each other during below freezing temperatures. You can also purchase a feeder warmer at a bird supply store or online. (It looks something like a lamppost with a feeder incorporated.) Some people attach hand warmers to their feeders. If you’re a truly enterprising DIYer, you can also jury-rig incandescent light bulbs to feeders. Google can guide you to instructions.

How to keep birds safe from Avian bird flu

Cleanliness is crucial too, McQuillan says, as diseases can spread easily at feeders. Once a week, wash your feeder with a 10 per cent bleach solution (nine parts water, one part bleach). Give it a good rinse and then refill it. And McQuillan leaves us with a heartbreaking caveat: avoid feeders with metal parts as the birds’ tiny tongues can get stuck when the metal gets cold.

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Categories
Cottage Life

Wild Profile: Meet the Northern cardinal

By Danita Delimont/Shutterstock

The Northern cardinal is a cheery pop of colour against the winter landscape. Unlike so many other bird species, cardinals don’t moult their bright red plumage, so they stand out at bird feeders year-round. They’re one of North America’s most recognizable species—who can’t ID a cardinal? Even the females have a sharp, spikey crest and a cherry-coloured beak. Pretty, pretty bird!

The Northern cardinal is unusual for another reason: it’s one of the few female songbirds that actually sings (usually in spring and summer, on the nest). Ornithologists believe this may tell their male partners when to bring them food. (“I want pickles and ice cream! Right now!”) A female Northern cardinal also typically sings longer and more complex tunes than the male—again, unusual in the bird world.

In winter, cardinals are largely quiet. But they do form large flocks, for foraging—sometimes they’ll gather with other species such as dark-eyed juncos and white-throated sparrows. They’re pretty easy to attract to winter bird feeders; with no insects to hunt for, they’ll eat almost any seed you put out. (That said, they’re big fans of black-oil sunflower seeds.)

Weekly Hack: Winter bird feeding tips

Although mated pairs that hooked up the previous spring will often stay together for the winter, about one fifth of couplings break up by the time the next breeding season rolls around. Aww, divorce sucks. Newly split, both male and females are ready to find a new mate.

Have you ever seen a cardinal attacking its own reflection—in mirrors or car windows, for example? That’s because in spring and early summer, both males and females obsessively and fiercely defend their territories. Including from themselves. A cardinal isn’t smart enough to realize that it’s fighting its own reflection, and will attack a shiny surface for hours.

 

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Cottage Life

Wild Profile: Meet the white-breasted nuthatch

By yvontrep/Shutterstock

While it’s not as colourful as its cousin (the red-breasted nuthatch), the white-breasted nuthatch is just as clever and acrobatic. The bluish-grey and white bird is our largest nuthatch—though still no bigger than a sparrow—with a bulbous head, no neck, and a sharp beak that curves upwards.

Winter is one of the best times of the year to spot the white-breasted nuthatch, either at your feeder (try attracting them with suet or peanut butter) or scaling trees moving up, down, or sidebars, in a trademark jerky motion. You’ll also spot why they earned their name: all nuthatches are known for shoving nuts and seeds into a tree bark crevice, then “hatching” them open by smashing them with their bills. So smart!

Along with caching food, white-breasted nuthatches use a specific foraging strategy to nourish themselves through the winter: they’ll join mixed flocks of other non-migratory birds—chickadees and titmice—and hunt for food as part of a larger group. It’s possible this strategy offers protection from predators and makes it more likely for an individual white-breast to find food. (Many hands—er, eyes—make light work.)

That said, in winter, it’s still every bird for itself: a white-breasted nuthatch isn’t above knocking another aside to get feeder food. If you watch yours carefully, you might spot a male pushing nearby females out of the way. Rude! Nuthatches will also steal from each others’ food hiding spots; this is why, once a bird has gathered a morsel, it will first fly in the opposite direction of where it intends to cache the food, hoping to throw spying nuthatches off the trail.

Recent research suggests that the white-breasted nuthatch is an “irruptive” species, and will migrate—or not—based on food availability in winter. This is big news in the avian world. For a long time, ornithologists believed that red-breasted nuthatches exhibited this behaviour but other nuthatch family members didn’t.

These are the best places to go winter birding in Ontario.

Categories
Cottage Life

Wild Profile: Meet the white-breasted nuthatch

By yvontrep/Shutterstock

While it’s not as colourful as its cousin (the red-breasted nuthatch), the white-breasted nuthatch is just as clever and acrobatic. The bluish-grey and white bird is our largest nuthatch—though still no bigger than a sparrow—with a bulbous head, no neck, and a sharp beak that curves upwards.

Winter is one of the best times of the year to spot the white-breasted nuthatch, either at your feeder (try attracting them with suet or peanut butter) or scaling trees moving up, down, or sidebars, in a trademark jerky motion. You’ll also spot why they earned their name: all nuthatches are known for shoving nuts and seeds into a tree bark crevice, then “hatching” them open by smashing them with their bills. So smart!

Along with caching food, white-breasted nuthatches use a specific foraging strategy to nourish themselves through the winter: they’ll join mixed flocks of other non-migratory birds—chickadees and titmice—and hunt for food as part of a larger group. It’s possible this strategy offers protection from predators and makes it more likely for an individual white-breast to find food. (Many hands—er, eyes—make light work.)

That said, in winter, it’s still every bird for itself: a white-breasted nuthatch isn’t above knocking another aside to get feeder food. If you watch yours carefully, you might spot a male pushing nearby females out of the way. Rude! Nuthatches will also steal from each others’ food hiding spots; this is why, once a bird has gathered a morsel, it will first fly in the opposite direction of where it intends to cache the food, hoping to throw spying nuthatches off the trail.

Recent research suggests that the white-breasted nuthatch is an “irruptive” species, and will migrate—or not—based on food availability in winter. This is big news in the avian world. For a long time, ornithologists believed that red-breasted nuthatches exhibited this behaviour but other nuthatch family members didn’t.

These are the best places to go winter birding in Ontario.

Categories
Cottage Life

Wild Profile: Meet the pileated woodpecker

By MTKhaled mahmud/Shutterstock

If you only aim to photograph one woodpecker this winter, make it the pileated woodpecker. Like its relatives (the hairy and the downy woodpeckers), it has no separate breeding or winter range, and stays put year-round. If you lure it out into the open—try suet feeders—the shy pileated woodpecker is easy to ID. It has a knife-sharp bill that’s longer than an eagle’s, and a bright red crest that sticks straight up in the air. Males have a red forehead and “moustache”; on females, these markings are black.

Where do pileated woodpeckers live?

These cavity-nesting birds usually stick to the same territory from one season to the next, sometimes re-using a nest hole they’d carved out (Mom and Dad working as a team) earlier that year. For winter, a pileated woodpecker will chisel out a separate roosting hole. If this woodpecker is easy to identify, it’s almost as easy to spot a tree that it’s been feasting on. Thanks to that dagger-like beak, it can carve holes as large as a foot long and four inches wide. The excavation damage leaves piles of wood splinters the size of crayons at the base of the tree. A pileated woodpecker targets a tree infested with insects, mostly carpenter ants. Woody’s hearing is so sharp that it can detect the ant colony rustling inside the heart of the tree.

Why does that pileated woodpecker keep drumming!?

Although Woody will drum, in loud, resonating “rolls” year-round, you’ll most likely notice the sound in late winter and early spring. This is when males drum twice per minute, hoping to attract females. They also produce a high, chirping call.

A persistent pileated woodpecker can turn into a cottage pest if it won’t stop pounding on the knots in cedar siding, or if it keeps hammering away on a metal chimney. (So! Loud!) But if a male is banging away on your stove pipe to establish territory and call to the ladies, take heart that this noise should taper off in the summer, when it’s no longer breeding season. And if he’s going after your cottage’s exterior wood? Well, at least he’s alerted you to a possible ant infestation.