Backyard Birds II: The Rest of the Top 20

In the first part of this two-part tour of 20 of our most common and notable backyard birds, I covered the finches and sparrows, two groups of birds that often dominate feeding stations and our consequent attention. Today, I present another ten birds, sorted into three batches based not on their evolutionary relatedness, but on shared traits of habitat or feeding preference.

Woodland Birds

These birds are all associated with one of our most common native habitat types, oak woodland. Most feed directly on acorns as well as the plentiful other seeds and insects found in this habitat, translating to a shared affection for peanut feeders and nutty suet cakes, as well as seeds. There are other oak woodland birds that are more closely restricted to the native habitat, but these five are relative generalists that are also found in most neighborhoods as long as you have some trees.

California Scrub-Jay

Identify: Pretty unmistakable. Big, blue, loud, and fairly ubiquitous. More open areas not too crowded with trees or houses could get the smaller, quieter, and insect-eating western bluebird; more moist and wooded areas might host our less common jay, the Steller’s jay, crowned with an elegant black tuft and lacking the white front side of the scrub-jay.

Get acquainted: The scrub-jay is the most generalist and adaptable of these woodland birds, capable of thriving wherever there are at least some trees and therefore present in almost every yard. A lot of people seem to dislike jays. The most ecologically substantive objection to their existence is that they do bully and prey on smaller birds, taking a particularly heavy toll on eggs and nestlings. There does seem to be some correlation between the abundance of corvids (jays, crows, ravens) and the nesting success of local songbirds. But I would advise against making it too personal of an objection against these birds; there are, after all, certain other species that have had fairly dire aggregate effects on songbird populations (ahem, cats, humans). In my personal experience talking with backyard birdwatchers, the other common complaint is their loud, strident voice. “Jay-like” is a term of auditory description precisely antonymous to “dulcet.”

On the other hand, they are highly intelligent, capable of fierce social loyalty, recognizing themselves in mirrors, recognizing individual humans, counting, and evaluating the acorn-thieving potential of different animal species. Most impressive of all, perhaps, is their incredible spatial memory, which far exceeds our own. An individual jay can bury some 6,000 acorns in a season, later recovering about half of these without the benefit of notes, markers, treasure maps, or “find my iPhone.” They are the vital distributors of these heavy and immobile seeds of our oaks, an invaluable service for which they have my everlasting gratitude.

For much more on jays, see our full profile: In Defense of the Blue Squawker.

Oak Titmouse

Identify: A small, very plain gray bird. Their most notable features are 1) their pointy crest (the pointiness of which, it should pointed out, is variable depending upon mood and posture) and 2) their lack of any other notable features. Our other small plain gray bird is the bushtit, which doesn’t visit feeders, is very round and less upright, is constantly flocking outside of the nesting season, and has no crest.

Get acquainted: They have been called “the voice and soul of the oaks,” an appellation which I find hard to deny and which encapsulates a few aspects of their appeal to oak-lovers like myself. One: their voice, raspy and scratchy, but in a way that is rather expressive and personable even at its most belligerent. Two: “soul of the oaks” suggests their geographic boundedness and strong affiliation to a distinct home community. Titmice mate for life and stay together in a year-round pair, unlike most of the finches and sparrows, for instance, which have looser and more ephemeral pair bonds in spring, which fade away as they gather into winter flocks and migrate or wander around who knows where. Not titmice. All year round, your titmice pair will stay put in your yard, joined for a while around May by their offspring, but otherwise fiercely codependent in an exclusive Nation of Two that brooks no interlopers. All that said, titmice are relatively flexible in their habitat needs and have adapted fairly well to most neighborhoods with a decent volume of ornamental trees and perhaps a few remnant native oaks in the vicinity.

For much more on titmice, see our full profile.

Chestnut-backed Chickadee

Identify: Chickadees are titmice relatives with bold black and white face patterns, sharing many features of habitat type, food preference, and nesting patterns. Visually, they are smaller and rounder than titmice, and are easily recognized by their bold white cheek patches intersecting their cap and bib of black. Our local species, the chestnut-backed chickadee, has – you guessed it – a chestnut brown back.

Get acquainted: Our local chickadee is somewhat less adaptable than titmice and typically requires neighborhoods with nearby native woodland or at least substantial and mature ornamental trees. This bird is a perennial favorite at feeders and regular contender for “cutest backyard bird.” In addition to being small and cosily rounded, their vocal repertoire includes some endearingly squeaky sounds to pair with the titmouse-like raspy calls and their general attitude towards life walks an impressive line between trusting and fearless. See them land on your hand for seeds, for instance, as in the local photo above. Or consider the following reflection on the eastern equivalent, the black-capped chickadee, from this classic poem from the Sage of Concord, “The Titmouse” (remember, chickadees are basically the members of the titmice family with white cheek patches):

I think no virtue goes with size;
The reason of all cowardice
Is, that men are overgrown,
And, to be valiant, must come down
To the titmouse dimension.

– Emerson, “The Titmouse”

For much more on chickadees, see our full profile, The Antidote of Fear.

Downy Woodpecker

Identify: Our woodpeckers generally are mid-sized birds (all bigger than titmice, etc.), with a color palette dominated by black and white (males often have a red head patch), and unique physical adaptations for clinging to the sides of trees. The shortcut to identifying woodpeckers species is to look at the back pattern: downy woodpeckers have a white back that shows as a vertical white patch between their black wings. Their cousin the hairy woodpecker is notoriously similar, but is larger, bigger-billed, and less common in yards, since they typically require more and bigger trees.

Get acquainted: Our smallest and most common backyard woodpecker, though we have another four species or so that also visit yards. As I alluded to above, woodpeckers have some rather unique adaptations that underlie their distinctive lifestyle: their feet are “zygodactylic,” with two toes pointing forward and two backwards (rather than three in front and one backwards) and their stiff tail feathers are used to brace and balance the body against a tree surface. Imagine one of your toes evolving its way around your foot for better tree-climbing ability. Very interesting notion.

Nuttall’s Woodpecker

Identify: Another fairly common backyard woodpecker, only slightly bigger than the downy, but with horizontal white bars across the back. No other local woodpecker has a “ladder back.” In this case also, only males have the red head patch.

Get acquainted: To continue reflecting on the general wonders of woodpeckers, these birds have also developed some sort of biological shock absorbers in their skulls to fit them for a life of hammering on wood with their heads. This is another interesting way of living that I like to contemplate periodically, a miracle of avian evolution which is less superficially astounding than, say, the non-stop 7,000 mile overseas migration of the bar-tailed godwit, but which in its quirkiness reveals its similar dissimilarity to our human notions of normal daily conduct. Birds’ flying abilities make our most graceful athletes look clumsy; the contrast is similarly extreme if you imagine how awkward we would be at hammering open, say, coconuts with our heads.

Once you’ve completed digesting that interesting thought experiment and are ready to attract some woodpeckers to your yard, you might like to know that woodpeckers of most species, oak-bound nut-eaters that they are, particularly favor peanut and suet feeders. Given their special feet arrangements described above, clinging to some kind of mesh tends to be more comfortable than the designated perches found on typical seed tubes and the like.

Nectar-Feeding Birds

These two birds can be attracted to feeders offering a 4-to-1 sugar water solution, which imitates the nectar found in flowers. Both also eat insects. 

Anna’s Hummingbird

Identify: Males have an iridescent head that may appear anywhere from red to magenta to black depending on the angle of light, while females are mostly gray in front and green-backed, with just a few little sparkles on the throat (the “gorget”).