(HOST) Commentator Ted Levin is a nature writer and photographer who reports that he’s had some unusual visitors to his birdfeeders this year.
(LEVIN) Between recent snowfalls I refilled my birdfeeders with black oil sunflower seeds. Before I reached the garage the birds had returned to the feeders – chickadees mostly, a tufted titmouse, a white-breasted nuthatch, and six common redpolls. Redpolls! These tame little finches rarely visit my house. I spotted one at the feeders in mid November but it left almost immediately. Then a few days later, another redpoll appeared and stayed for the whole afternoon. But six redpolls at once is, for me, a sort of coup.
The common redpoll is small and sparrowlike, with pale, streaked feathers and an ivory-colored bill. In the spring, the males have
a rosy bloom on their sides and breast, not the dark stains of a rose-breasted grosbeak, but a light, delicate wash as if the bird were blushing. One of the six at my feeders was a male, still in breeding attire. All redpolls, all the time have red caps (hence the name) and black chins. Goatees.
Only once before have I seen a large number of redpolls in Vermont. It was in 1977 – my first year here – that more than two hundred redpolls spent most of the winter with us in South Strafford – draining our supply of sunflower seeds. That year, they were everywhere and noisy, calling their swee-swee-sweets from the tops and outer branches of birches as they fed on catkins; whenever a flock crossed above the pasture, they’d give a twittering flight call.
Redpolls, which breed across subarctic forests and tundra scrub from Alaska to Newfoundland and Greenland, are not the only winter songbird to appear in Vermont this year. I’ve seen flocks of Bohemian waxwings for more than a month on Thetford Hill – brown-crested and gray bodied, tails dipped in yellow, wings spotted with red and yellow and white, gaudy actually for a northern bird. They pass above the post office or feast on crabapples. And whenever a flock finds a crabapple tree, the ground below is littered with pieces of fruit, which the turkeys clean up.
Apparently, there’s been a crash in the production of spruce and fir seeds this year in far northern forests, which accounts for the waxwings and redpolls in Vermont. A recent statewide rare bird alert posted on the web listed sightings of waxwings from both sides of the Green Mountains: 40 in Essex, 100 in Lyndonville, 95 on Grand Isle and so on.
Another northern arrival, the pine grosbeak, is being reported all over the state this winter – from St. Albans to Vernon. The male is red and the female is gray with yellowish head and rump; both have huge black bills. They love apple seeds, and tear apart the
frozen fruit to reach them.
White crossbills and red crossbills have also begun to appear on the statewide reports, and Lapland longspurs and snow buntings. I had a run of red-breasted nuthatches and purple finches at the feeders earlier in the fall, the vanguard of the irruption of northern birds.
Today however, all I have at the feeder are black-capped chickadees. I can always count on them to brighten up my morning.
You can find more of Ted Levin’s commentaries at VPR-dot-net.