At this very moment, in the predawn twilight at 7:10 am on January 30, 2023, exactly 25 minutes before sunrise, the temperature is 13 below zero and the westerly wind is blowing steadily at over 11 miles per hour. I’m looking out my home office window and see a female cardinal down in my big platform feeder, a Dark-eyed Junco feeding on the ground beneath it, and a fluffed-out chickadee pecking at a sunflower seed from a nearby boxelder branch. A male cardinal flies in at 7:13, chasing the female off the platform feeder. At 7:15, 7 juncos are on the ground and in the lilac bush. One flies into the white spruce by my window.
When cardinals are in the neighborhood, they’re invariably the first species to show up, quickly followed by the juncos. I have no idea where any of them roost at night—they seem to materialize out of nowhere, suddenly just there in the feeder, lilac bush, and ground beneath. But I can watch the chickadees flying in from various directions.
These first birds of the day have triumphed over the long night, but survival for each is still tenuous until they’ve consumed enough calories to maintain their daytime body temperature. It's freaky to look at a chickadee and realize that just millimeters from that -13¬º F air temperature, its heart and the blood coursing through its tissues are a feverish 108º F. Chickadees “turn down the thermostat” at night, allowing their body temperature to drop down to the 70s or sometimes even lower. When they awaken, they shiver violently, quickly metabolizing brown fat deposits to raise their body temp back to normal, but must quickly “stoke the furnace” with high-caloric food. When a bird succumbs to the cold, it’s usually right around the critical time after that long winter’s night when it needs food. We never see the chickadees who just don’t have enough energy to raise their body temperature back to normal—they die inside their tiny roosting cavity.
By 7:20, still 15 minutes before sunrise, three more chickadees came in to grab a seed and flew off. Now a fourth is pecking at a seed while perched on the window feeder, protected from the westerly wind. Chickadees don’t like eating where other birds are coming in, but this one has the feeder to itself. Nope—another chickadee just flew in to get its own seed, and the first flew off. It happened too quickly for me to see whether it finished its seed, dropped it, or carried it off, but I’m not worried—chickadees grasp a sunflower seed in their feet and peck a tiny hole in the shell, then start taking tiny bites out of the kernel even as they continue to enlarge the hole in the shell. This one had been working on the seed long enough to get most of the calories before it took off.
Most birds sleeping in cavities stay in their roost holes later than birds sleeping on bare branches. The cavity can be several degrees warmer than the open air, warmed a bit by the birds’ own bodies. On the coldest days, I seldom see the first nuthatches, woodpeckers, or starlings until several minutes after sunrise, which today is 7:35. A few chickadees come earlier if their need for breakfast is too urgent.
At 7:45, ten minutes after sunrise, it still looks like twilight despite the clear sky. On these bitter cold mornings while Lake Superior is still open, the sun must rise not just above the horizon but above a thick cloud of steam over the lake before we see any sunbeams at all.
The first cavity rooster other than those earliest chickadees today is BB, my banded Pileated Woodpecker, at 7:48. He’s hard to identify—I must see the band on his right leg to be sure he’s not a different male, but today he's holding his belly against his feet to keep them warm. He even let go of the feeder with one foot to press it more tightly against his tummy for a few seconds, then switched to the other foot. He was in the feeder for 5 minutes—just long enough for me to get one quick glimpse of his band. I couldn't get any photos—my home office window was frozen shut.
A starling appeared at 7:53, and the second woodpecker to appear showed up at 8:04—my male Red-bellied Woodpecker—followed almost immediately by a Blue Jay. A whole flock of starlings flew in from the east at 8:07, and a female Hairy Woodpecker at 8:08. All three of my wintering Blue Jays were here by 8:10, so I went down to put out room-temperature peanuts for them and my squirrels.
At 8:13, while I was still downstairs, I picked out a tiny bit of red in the boxelder at the far end of my driveway. It was BB at the top of a large broken limb, facing the not-quite-risen sun, body feathers all fluffed out.
It wasn’t until 8:20, fully 45 minutes after sunrise, that the sun crested the steam cloud over the lake and cast the first beams of sunlight my way. At that very minute, maybe because he saw sunlight finally hitting the tree trunks, BB flew off.
Now it’s 8:30, I’ve finished my coffee, and it’s time to get dressed and head off to babysit my grandson. I’m a little sad to leave before I can see for sure that my female Red-bellied Woodpecker made it through the night. I wonder what time my nuthatches will arrive, and if one or both of my Mourning Doves will show up today.
There haven’t been many birds for me to watch here this winter, but that just makes me pay closer attention to the ones I do see.