"Yank ... yank ... yankyank."
If you've gone for a walk in the woods in winter, you may have heard this distinctive nasal sound. It's the "staying in contact" call of the white-breasted nuthatch. Unlike most other birds, male and female nuthatches remain paired up throughout the year. And couples frequently "yank" to each other during feeding forays.
These handsome gray, black and white sparrow-sized birds spend much of each winter day industriously searching for food hidden in the crevices of tree bark. If you have large, old deciduous trees in your yard, you might get an eyeful of nuthatches because these birds are true tree huggers. Nuthatches sleep and nest in tree cavities and prowl the trunks and limbs of trees for food. (Among their favorite foods are the egg sacs of spiders and insects.)
Many people think of nuthatches as the clowns of the bird world, in part because of their unique style of foraging. Other birds hop up tree trunks, flit from branch to branch or walk on the ground as they hunt for food. Nuthatches skitter down a tree, spiraling head first around the trunk, with their toes firmly planted and their eyes darting. Though it may be a funny-looking way of feeding, it allows them to find food that other birds might have missed.
These birds also have a fun and very apt name: "nut" plus "hatch," which is derived from the Middle English word for hack. And nuthatches do indeed "hatch" nuts, by wedging them into bark or the fork of a tree, then hacking them open.
Territorial homebodies
Despite their humorous name and kooky-seeming behavior, nuthatches are very focused birds. In winter, they stockpile food, scavenging in the forest or at bird feeders. They'll spend hours dashing to and fro, snatching one seed at a time, then hiding it to eat later. In addition to hiding seeds in bark crevasses, they'll also use manmade structures such as stone walls, siding and roofing. In fact, the shingles on the edge of my garage roof are slightly raised from all the safflower seeds hidden underneath by nuthatches.
Nuthatches are homebodies that identify strongly with their territory and seldom leave it. During the winter, nuthatches will join small, moving flocks of chickadees and downy woodpeckers to feed. But they leave the group as soon as it reaches the edge of their territory.
