By ED KANZE
As you drive along listening to holiday songs on the radio, you may grow weary of certain melodies and lyrics. One that gets under my skin is “Winter Wonderland.” Specifically, the part that nettles me is when the lyrics tell of a bluebird going away (so far so good) and a new bird arriving, a new bird that sings in the middle of the sleighbell-jangled wonderland the song is named for.
Yes, it is possible to hear newly arrived birds singing in winter, but on the whole, they don’t. When it’s frosty, survival is the pressing duty, not battling for territory and courting prospective mates, which is what singing tends to be all about. So while a couple of human lovers marching gleefully through the snow on a winter day may well see, say, a winter visitor such as the tree sparrow, they are unlikely to hear it singing.
Why do some birds stay with us in winter and others leave? Ornithologists tend to think the staying and leaving is not so much a matter of keeping warm as it is finding food. After all, birds are feathered, and feathers provide marvelous insulation. All the insulation in the world, however, won’t do a bird much good if it can’t find sustenance.
A good many birds, such as black-capped chickadees and mourning doves, manage to stick around through northern winters by increasing the percentage of seeds and dried fruits in their diet. In the warm months, these birds feed to a high degree on insects, but with the cool weather of autumn and the cold of winter, insects grow hard to find. Chickadees, in particular, are skilled at finding insects that overwinter as eggs and pupae, but all the same, seeds become a big part of their diet when temperatures drop below freezing. Mourning doves, perhaps less adept at finding overwintering insects, persist especially in places where bird feeders help them do so.
Hummingbirds? They’ve got to go. While they also eat insects, they require copious amounts of sweet nectar to power their frenetic metabolisms and wingbeats. When the temperature drops, they bolt for Central America or thereabouts.
Two of our woodpeckers trade northern breeding grounds for southern winter homes. They are the yellow-bellied sapsucker and the northern flicker. The sapsucker feeds to some degree on flowing sap and even more on the flying insects drawn to the sap-wells that sapsuckers drill in tree trunks. This lifestyle doesn’t fly in the northern states in winter. Off the sapsucker goes to southerly climes. The flicker dines on a variety of things but especially on ants it spirits out of anthills. As the ground freezes, snow sometimes buries it, and ants become unavailable, flickers face a choice: leave, or stay and struggle to adapt. Nearly all of them leave, not to be seen again in the neighborhood until spring.
Other woodpeckers, such as the downy, the hairy, and the pileated, stick around. The grubs and pupae and carpenter ants and smattering of seeds and fruits they consume remain available.
In summer, vireos, especially the red-eyed vireo, may outnumber all our other songbirds. These birds are largely insect eaters, and the insects they gorge on are largely moth and butterfly larva, which is to say, inchworms and caterpillars. Vireos can’t find these in winter, so they go far from us. The red-eyed you see plucking inchworms from your fruit trees in July may spend half the year or more in the Amazon River Basin of South America.
Blue jays, by contrast, linger. Or at least some of them do. In your yard in fall, you may briefly host flocks of migratory jays making their way to places where winters are milder than in our neck of the woods. Lots stay, though, which is no surprise. Blue jays aren’t especially picky when it comes to dining. If you’re a bird, the less picky you are, the more prepared you are to flourish through a northern winter.
Ed Kanze is a Westchester-born author, naturalist and licensed guide who lives in the Adirondack Mountains. His latest book, “The Nature of the Place,” will be published in March 2025.