I sat on the edge of a thirty-acre, maturing woodlot of larger trees about a mile and a half south of New Holland, Pennsylvania for a couple hours in mid-October of this year to experience what birds were in it. Yellow leaves fell from the trees, almost as steadily as a light snow. And the foliage of poison ivy and Virginia creeper vines, that had climbed large trees along a bordering country road, was red, further giving me a feeling of autumn. The berries on those poison ivy and creeper vines, and on a few Tartarian honeysuckle bushes in the woods, will feed birds and rodents through winter.
The first birds I saw in that little patch of woods was a small flock of American robins and a few blue jays that were drinking and bathing in the shallows of a brook flowing gently through the woodland. Though common species, the robins and jays were still attractive, and neat to see splashing in the water.
Both species are done nesting and the robins are gathering into groups, some of which will fly farther south for the winter while others stay in this area through winter and eat berries every day, the only food that usually is available to them in winter. The robins in those woods probably will consume the berries already mentioned in this article, plus those on spice bushes deeper in this bottomland woods.
Each winter evening, the robins that stay north will huddle together in shrubbery and young coniferous trees where they will spend the night. There they will be relatively safe from predators and the weather.
When they aren't bathing in shallow water, the local blue jays are now busily gathering small acorns, like those from pin oaks, and storing them in crevices in tree bark and in the ground. They push those nuts in hiding places with their sturdy beaks and pull them out of hiding when food is scarce in winter. The jays' beautiful blue feathering is particularly lovely when flashing through the warmly-colored leaves of the oaks during October.
I saw four species of woodpeckers, hairy, downy and red-bellied woodpeckers, and northern flickers, in this patch of tall trees while I visited it for a couple hours. All but the flickers are permanent residents in that woodlot; most flickers are migratory. All those woodpeckers were either searching for invertebrates in dead wood on the trees, eating berries, or flying about in search of food or seeing what the neighbors were doing.
Downy and red-bellied woodpeckers are often seen around this area because they are adaptable and common in local woodlands, fields with a few trees in them, and older suburban areas with their many maturing trees.
Woodpeckers have handsome feathering and a few specialized body parts that help them with their way of life. They have stiff tail feathers that prop them up against tree trunks as they chip into them for invertebrates. They have two toes in front of each foot and two in back to prop them better on tree trunks. They have sharp beaks for chiseling into wood. And woodpeckers have sticky, exceptionally long tongues for running into insect tunnels when they chisel into them. The invertebrates adhere to the woodpeckers' tongues, which the birds pull out of the burrows loaded with tiny critters that they swallow.
As in most any patch of woods or wooded suburb, locally, a small, mixed group of Carolina chickadees and tufted titmice roamed through the woods looking for insects and their eggs. Always on the move and, seemingly, cheerful, these little, related birds are always a delight to experience. These species are permanent residents, also, and will be in these woods through each year.
A song sparrow and a family of northern cardinals are a couple other kinds of resident birds I saw on the edge of those woods during the couple of hours I was in them in October. The song sparrow was scratching in the soil for seeds, as his kind will do. The cardinals were mostly flitting about, probably not liking my presence in the woods. I knew they were a family because one was bright red all over, the mature male, and another was mostly brown with red feathers in the wings and tail, and had a pink beak, the adult female. But a third cardinal had brown feathering with a bit of red on its wings and tail. But this one had a dark bill, a youngster hatched late this past summer. These cardinals, like the song sparrow, will eat seeds and berries here through winter.
Several kinds of birds can be spotted almost anywhere, most any time. We only need to get and look for them in interesting habitats.
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