[Mnbird] red breasted nuthatch

[Pamela Freeman]

I recently moved to St Michael, in August. I live on the Crow river, across
from Crow Hassan Park. I have a couple plus of acres, where it is natural,
it is hardwoods, primarily maple basswood with hackberry and ash. Around
the house it is planted with a wide variety of coniferous trees and some
hardwoods. (Including, I think, an American Chestnut! and some that I have
not been able to identify.)

Anyway, enough of flora.
I have red breasted nuthatches here. They keep coming to my feeders so I
get a lovely look at them.
Cute, they are. I think I like them even more than their white breasted
kin.
I have them, also.
I used to live in Oak Grove, on the sand plain, along a marsh and creek in
an open oak woods.
I am finding that the birds at my new location are much different.

I miss the catbirds and brown thrashers, the redstarts and others who
inhabit the understory of oak forests and wet thickets.
Here there is no understory, it is too dark and what woods I have is at a
steep angle banking to the river. Part of it is an actual bluff.

I did have a family of pileateds who entertained me with their offspring
who though large, insisted on being fed late into the summer. Loudly and
with great flapping of wings.
And I enjoy the methodical probing that a trio of flickers would commence
as they worked their way across my yard, almost in a line, advancing,
probing, advancing, probing, advancing...
They returned many times, but I have not seen them now for over a week.

I have a flock of turkeys who enjoy wandering across my driveway monitor
trigger, one after another, and then looping back, so that it goes off
again and again and again and again. I get up from my chair where I have
been working, to peer at who or what might be coming down my driveway and
there they are, lined up and wandering back and forth across my driveway.
They don't do this in any other spot of the driveway. How do they KNOW?

And today, this morning, it wasn't the turkeys that triggered that alarm,
which plays a very nasally digitally produced Fur Elise. It was the fox.
THE fox is a fox, a female, I think, who regularly travels through my yard,
usually in the morning, but sometimes the afternoon, on the hunt. I think
it is the fox who has dug up the mole tunnels and left them changed from
raised lumpy lines to loose lines of upturned soil.

In any case, said fox triggered my driveway monitor and then entertained me
as it leapt and pounced after some rodent in a garden. I saw the small
mammal run along a fence rung, and then the fox give chase and then they
moved past where my window allowed me to spy on them. So I shall never know
if the rodent got away, which would make me feel good for it, or if the fox
got it and got a meal, which would make me feel good for the fox but bad
for the rodent. Either way, one loses and the other wins. This is life in
nature. And death. Death isn't always loss, it may be life for another.

Sent from eastern Wright county, nearly Hennepin, St Michael.

Pamela Freeman
- Pamela
Never give up on a dream just because of the length of time it will take to
accomplish it. The time will pass anyway. - Unknown

“There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot.”
― Aldo Leopold
I am one who cannot.


On Fri, Sep 11, 2020 at 4:18 PM Larson, Norman W. via Mnbird <
mnbird at lists.mnbird.net> wrote:

> This afternoon my wife saw a red breasted nuthatch in our yard. This is
> the first one in the 13 years we have lived in southern Eagan, near I-35E
> and Cliff Road.
> [image: University of St. Thomas : All for the Common Good]
> <https://www.stthomas.edu/e>
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