Nuthatch Love

Chickadees are cute and fun to watch, but you know what bird I really enjoy visiting my feeders? Yup, it's the nuthatch! They're not too common in my backyard, not enough trees I guess, but I have 1 nuthatch who visits fairly regularly and sometimes a second nuthatch comes along to check out the feeders. On the weekends when I'm home, I turn on my outside speaker to hear the birds chirping and that's how I know the nuthatch has arrived -- I can hear its squeaky little chirps and "yanks" as it searches for peanuts in the birdfeeders. Let's watch......

Hey, this feeder looks like it's full of peanuts!

Wow, from this perspective all's I can see is peanuts! Is that for me?

Dang! That's a tight squeeze! Must. Get. Peanut!!
Finally got it! Making sure I don't drop this peanut.....

Let's go & find a quieter spot to enjoy this peanut -- the paparazzi's making me nervous!

In addition to feeding shelled peanuts, I put out a birdseed blend that contains peanuts and sunflower hearts in a couple different feeders. This little seed ball that my dear friend Lynne gave me works great for this seed blend and accomodates only the clinging birdies -- nuthatches included!

The Yankee Tipper is where nuthatch usually heads first at feeding time -- four ports in which to search for peanuts!

Years ago when I worked at Wild Birds Unlimited, we once had a customer come in and asked us to help him identify a bird that was coming to his feeder -- obviously new to birding, the best way he could describe it was that it looked like a "miniature bluejay." After several minutes of questions about the bird's habits and more description, we finally showed him picture of a nuthatch and he said, "yeah, that's it!"

Miniature Bluejay? Really??
(I guess that's an honest, novice birding mistake.....)