Category: White-breasted Nuthatch

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Photo of the Day

The White-breasted Nuthatch is a familiar woodpecker-like songbird of deciduous forests, parks, and wooded suburbs.  It frequently descends the trunks of trees head first while searching the bark for insects.  Nuthatches visit feeding stations stocked with cracked corn, sunflower seeds, suet, or peanuts.
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Coming Soon, Very Soon: Brood X Periodical Cicadas

Yesterday, a hike through a peaceful ridgetop woods in the Furnace Hills of southern Lebanon County resulted in an interesting discovery.  It was extraordinarily quiet for a mid-April afternoon.  Bird life was sparse—just a pair of nesting White-breasted Nuthatches and a drumming Hairy Woodpecker.  A few deer scurried down the hillside.  There was little else to see or hear.  But if one were to have a look below the forest floor, they’d find out where the action is.

Not much action in the deer-browsed understory of this stand of hardwoods.
Upon discovery beneath a rock, this invertebrate quickly backed its way down the burrow, promptly seeking shelter in the underground section of the excavation.
A closeup of the same image reveals the red eyes of this Periodical Cicada (Magicicada species) nymph.  It has reached the end of seventeen years of slowly feeding upon the sap from a tree root to nourish its five instars (stages) of larval development.

2021 is an emergence year for Brood X, the “Great Eastern Brood”—the largest of the 15 surviving broods of Periodical Cicadas.  After seventeen years as subterranean larvae, the nymphs are presently positioned just below ground level, and they’re ready to see sunlight.  After tunneling upward from the deciduous tree roots from which they fed on small amounts of sap since 2004, they’re awaiting a steady ground temperature of about 64 degrees Fahrenheit before surfacing to climb a tree, shrub, or other object and undergo one last molt into an imago—a flying adult.

Here, approximately one dozen Periodical Cicada nymphs have tunneled into pre-emergence positions beneath a rock.  Seventeen-year Periodical Cicadas, sometimes mistakenly called “seventeen-year locusts”, are the longest-lived of our insects.
Note the wings and red eyes beneath the exoskeleton of this Periodical Cicada nymph. Within weeks it will join billions of others in a brief emergence to molt, dry, fly, mate, and die.
Adult (imago) Periodical Cicadas.  Brood X includes all three species of seventeen-year Periodical Cicadas: Magicicada septendecim, M. cassinii, and M. septendecula.  All Periodical Cicadas in the United States are found east of the Great Plains, the lack of trees there prohibiting the expansion of their range further west.  Seventeen-year life cycles account for twelve of the fifteen broods of Periodical Cicadas; the balance live for thirteen years.  The range of Brood X includes the lower Susquehanna basin and parts of Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, Ohio, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia.  (United States Department of Agriculture/Agricultural Research Service image)
The flight of Periodical Cicadas peaks in late-May and June.  Shown here is the Eastern Scissor Grinder, an “Annual Cicada” that emerges later in the season, peaking yearly during July and August.

The woodlots of the Lower Susquehanna River Watershed won’t be quiet for long.  Loud choruses of male Periodical Cicadas will soon roar through forest and verdant suburbia.  They’re looking for love, and they’re gonna die trying to find it.  And dozens and dozens of animal species will take advantage of the swarms to feed themselves and their young.  Yep, the woods are gonna be a lively place real soon.

Did you say Periodical Cicadas?  We can hardly wait!
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Eighteen, and I Like It

Is this the same Conewago Falls I visited a week ago?  Could it really be?  Where are all the gulls, the herons, the tiny critters swimming in the potholes, and the leaping fish?  Except for a Bald Eagle on a nearby perch, the falls seems inanimate.

Yes, a week of deep freeze has stifled the Susquehanna and much of Conewago Falls.  A hike up into the area where the falls churns with great turbulence provided a view of some open water.  And a flow of open water is found downstream of the York Haven Dam powerhouse discharge.  All else is icing over and freezing solid.  The flow of the river pinned beneath is already beginning to heave the flat sheets into piles of jagged ice which accumulate behind obstacles and shallows.

Ice and snow surround a small zone of open water in a high-gradient area of Conewago Falls.
Ice chunks and sheets accumulate atop the York Haven Dam.  The weight of miles of ice backed up behind the dam eventually forces the accumulation over the top and into the Pothole Rocks below.  The popping and cracking sounds of ice both above and below the dam could be heard throughout the day as hydraulic forces continuously break and move ice sheets.
Steam from the Unit 1 cooling towers at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station rises above the frozen Riverine Grasslands at Conewago Falls.  The scouring action of winter ice keeps the grasslands clear of substantial woody growth and prevents succession into forest.
Despite a lack of activity on the river, mixed flocks of resident and wintering birds, including this White-breasted Nuthatch (Sitta carolinensis), were busy feeding in the Riparian Woodlands.  The White-breasted Nuthatch is a cavity nester and year-round denizen of hardwoods, often finding shelter during harsh winter nights in small tree holes.
The White-breasted Nuthatch is often seen working its way head-first down a tree trunk as it probes with its well-adapted bill for insects among the bark.
Jackpot!
Looking upstream from the river’s east shore at ice and snow cover on the Susquehanna above Conewago Falls and the York Haven Dam.  The impoundment, known as Lake Frederic, and its numerous islands of the Gettysburg Basin Archipelago were locked in winter’s frosty grip today.  Hill Island (Left) and Poplar Island (Center) consist of erosion-resistant York Haven Diabase, as does the ridge on the far shoreline seen rising in the distance between them.  To the right of Poplar Island in this image, the river passes by the Harrisburg International Airport.  At the weather station there, the high temperature was eighteen degrees Fahrenheit on this first day of 2018.
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