Now that our huge warbler migration fall-out is over, life
on Peabody Street is much less fraught. During the peak, I was getting several
hundred White-throated Sparrows in my yard—now I have fewer than a dozen from
day to day. Juncos and Fox Sparrows have supplanted the White-crowned and
Harris’s Sparrows, and I haven’t noticed a Yellow-rumped Warbler, in my suet
feeders or trees, in over a week.
With an order of magnitude fewer birds, it’s a little quiet
here, but there’s still plenty to look at. Back when things were still hopping,
I started hearing a Red-bellied Woodpecker on and off, but other than noisily
announcing his presence, he didn’t seem to want to reveal his whereabouts. But
now for the past 10 days or so, he’s been coming out into the open several
times a day.
He pigs out at my suet and peanut butter feeders, and finishes up
each visit with several trips to the tray feeder filled with sunflower seeds.
Red-bellied Woodpeckers don’t have a gular pouch—the throat pouch that Blue
Jays fill with seeds to hide away—so he can only handle two or three in his
bill at a time. He seems to be wedging them into crevices in the bark of trees
in my yard and my neighbor’s yard. He’ll make a dozen or so trips doing this
before he disappears for an hour or so. Hiding food around seems to indicate
that this guy will spend the winter here.
A male Pileated Woodpecker shows up
every few days. He’s very inquisitive—one day he even alighted on my picnic
table to check it out.
I have an above-average number of squirrels in my yard again
this year. It’s a problem, but we’ve finally succeeded in getting the bird
feeders situated so the squirrels can’t jump in from the fence or trees, and
Russ kept tweaking our squirrel guards until now none of the squirrels seem to
be breaching them. But when I’m at work at my desk, one squirrel gives me long,
hard stares. I’m pretty sure that’s the one who’d had mange or some other
scurvy skin condition a couple of winters ago. I’d been looking out for her—tossing
peanuts on the ground when she caught my attention—and so now she expects
special treatment. When she shows up, I’ve been tossing whole peanuts out the
window, and she rushes to the ground and grabs them. Unfortunately, several
other squirrels figured this out, and since I’m a soft touch, I’ve been
spending an inordinate amount of time at the window tossing peanuts to squirrels.
I didn’t have a huge Blue Jay presence in my yard this fall,
though a few times I had over a dozen at once. They don’t seem to be passing
through anymore. But one bird—he or she comes alone each time—started following the
squirrels and digging up their peanuts. Then he started flying in to peanuts I
was tossing on the ground. If I tossed out two or three, the jay always picked
up one and carried it over by another one, then put down the first and picked
up the second, and flew off with whichever one was heavier. But soon my
squirrels started darting for him whenever he alights on the ground. I’m far
more partial to a Blue Jay than to even the most endearing squirrel, but I
couldn’t toss the peanuts anywhere where he was safe from marauding squirrels,
so I started whistling and talking to him, and now when he arrives, now he
gives me a long, hard stare or squawks.
That's my signal to put a peanut on the roof of my
one small window feeder—the one place the squirrels can’t get to. At first the
jay was skittish and mistrustful, but now he flies in the moment the window is
closed, grabs his peanut, and flies off to hide it somewhere across the street.
Last weekend a pair of Blue Jays started chasing him and trying to steal them,
but they apparently didn’t find Peabody Street—at least my corner of it—a
suitable winter quarters, and I haven’t seen them in several days.
Besides these special individuals, I have a couple of flocks
of chickadees visiting regularly, including my beloved little one who’s missing
its front toes. So I’m spending this late fall in pleasant company—Peabody
Street’s very own Pickwick Club.
