Nothing But Leftovers?

If you provide supplemental foods for the birds visiting your garden sanctuary, we don’t need to tell you how expensive those provisions have become.  It can be quite frustrating when the majority of these pricey supplies get gobbled up by the chunky squirrels that dominate your feeding station and leave hungry birds with nothing but the tiny little scraps.

Here at susquehannawildlife.net headquarters, we like to feed whole peanuts in the shell to the resident and migratory native birds.  But placed out in the open on a stump or a tray, or even within a hopper feeder, peanuts are quickly carried away and cached for latter use by squirrels and jays.  The chickadees, titmice, nuthatches, wrens, and woodpeckers that could really use the extra food to maintain their body fat through the winter get nothing but leftovers.

It’s not unusual for squirrels and jays to scarf up and carry away 90% or more of the expensive peanuts placed at your feeding station.  The dozen or more other species of native birds that will partake of this offering get the leftovers or nothing at all.

We’ve discovered a solution that, for us, saves money and more efficiently feeds the native species of birds that stop by our oasis.  We’ve been using inexpensive ($6-$8) wire mesh tube feeders intended for suet nuggets to serve whole peanuts in the shell to our guests.  As long as they can’t knock the feeders to the ground, squirrels have failed to raid the contents.  Like other birds, Blue Jays can still peck away to remove the peanuts from their shells and eat them on the spot, but they can no longer haul off a whole feeder load at a time.  Each must carefully crack the shell and remove an individual peanut or portion thereof for immediate consumption.  The empty shells remain mostly in the tubes and don’t make a mess.  Pesky hoards of non-native European Starlings sometimes visit, but soon become frustrated because their bills aren’t adapted for cracking the hardened peanut husks; they grab any loose morsels they can get, then move along.

Suet Nugget Feeders
We assemble these suet nugget feeders without installing the included perches.  We fill them with UNSALTED peanuts in the shell, then hang them from stiff wire hooks beneath the larger horizontal limbs on some of our trees.  About every 5 to 10 days, we take them down to remove empty shells, clean the feeder, and add peanuts.  A 2-pound bag that would disappear within hours if freely accessible to squirrels now fills 3  feeders or more and nourishes our native birds for a week or longer.

The list of native birds visiting our peanut feeders includes:

Downy Woodpecker

Hairy Woodpecker

Red-bellied Woodpecker

Northern Flicker

Yellow-bellied Sapsucker

Blue Jay

Carolina Chickadee

Black-capped Chickadee

Tufted Titmouse

White-breasted Nuthatch

Red-breasted Nuthatch

Carolina Wren

Yellow-bellied Sapsucker
The most recent addition to the list of birds feasting on peanuts from our wire mesh tube feeders was this Yellow-bellied Sapsucker that visited yesterday.

So don’t pay hard-earned cash to feed nothing but leftovers to your intended guests, give wire mesh tube feeders and whole peanuts in the shell a try.  The colorful native birds will thank you with their presence.

Yellow-bellied Sapsucker
A welcome visitor, a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker stopping by for dinner…
Yellow-bellied Sapsucker
…and varying its diet by finding small insects among the bark of some of our larger trees.

Time to Eat

A glimpse of the rowdy guests crowding the Thanksgiving Day dinner table at susquehannawildlife.net headquarters…

White-breasted Nuthatch
A male White-breasted Nuthatch visits a peanut feeder…
White-breasted Nuthatch
…soon to be joined by a female White-breasted Nuthatch.
Downy Woodpecker
A male Downy Woodpecker gets a bill full of suet.
Carolina Wren
A Carolina Wren nibbles at a peanut.
Eastern Gray Squirrel
An Eastern Gray Squirrel stuffs itself on peanuts dropped by the birds.
Northern Mockingbird
A territorial Northern Mockingbird stands guard over its supply of Common Winterberry fruit.
Eastern Bluebird
To avoid the mockingbird’s aggression, the Eastern Bluebirds opted out of fresh fruit in favor of raisins offered at the feeders.
American Robin
This persistent American Robin has made an art of repeatedly sneaking in to quickly devour a few berries before being chased away by the vigilant mockingbird.
Dark-eyed Junco
After everyone has had their fill, Dark-eyed Juncos clean up the leftovers.

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.

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 Swamp Cicada (Neotibicen tibicen), 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!

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.