A River Never Sleeps

For most of the year nuthatches, creepers, and downy woodpeckers are solitary birds, but in late fall they often join up with the chickadees, kinglets, and juncos to form mixed "guilds"of merry looking, foraging flocks. These flocks enrich a fly fisherman’s world as they scour the forest in search of food – searching out tree trunks, leafless branches, and the ground for insect eggs, pupae, seeds, and small wild fruits.

Chickadees search the upper and low Fer surfaces of twigs and smaller branches for dormant insect eggs, larvae, and adult insects. At times they will even hang totally upside down.

The nuthatches search the tree trunks and larger branches for insects, spiders, and grubs. At times they too will feed upside down. Nuthatches have been called "tree mice" because of their ability to quickly move up and down a tree trunk. Unlike the woodpeckers and the Brown Creeper, which forage from the bottom of the tree trunk up, nuthatches have evolved the unique habit of preferentially going upside down a tree trunk in search of its insects, spiders, and grubs. Presumably, this upside down view reveals food sources that might go undetected by other birds, which forage in the opposite direction.

The nuthatch’s longer bill is better suited for searching bark crevices than x the chickadee’s short little pick-like bill, and presumably, this is one of the reasons why each has their own turf to feed on. The kinglets search for insects higher up in the trees.

The creeper "creeps" its way up the tree in a spiral like direction. Unlike the woodpeckers and nuthatches, which take short, quick steps as they move up and down the tree trunk, the creeper moves both its feet simultaneously in a quick hopping-like motion. Short legs and powerful, long claws hold the Brown Creeper tightly against the tree while a stiff, longish, sharply-pointed tail acts as a prop or brace whenever the bird moves its head back and forth as it probes various nooks and crannies with its slender, down-curved bill. It is looking for concealed, tiny insect eggs, larvae, and adult insects – especially those of the bark beetle.

After making its way halfway up the tree, the creeper flies to the bottom of another nearby tree and repeats the upwardly spiraling foraging behavior all over again.

Besides providing fly fishemen with welcome company, together these mixed flocks do us much good. Each can consume up to several hundred pestivourous insects each and every day. Most of the birds in these flocks also supplement their diet with seeds that they find laying around or seeds they have cached away earlier in the year when food was plentiful.

A good way to see these flocks in the city is to put out a bird feeder. Feeding birds is a good way to help these mixed flocks of small birds get through the winter. Depending on what you put in your winter birdfeeder, one can expect to see up to 25 different kinds of birds in the Pacific Northwest, including juncos, chickadees, Pine Siskins, nuthatches, thrushes, jays, crows, blackbirds, starlings, sparrows, finches, grosbeaks, woodpeckers, shrikes, and Sharp-shinned Hawks.

Of all our local birds, only grouse do not have to worry about starvation, in fact, they thrive in the winter months. Unlike many of our coastal animals, there is a seemingly inexhaustible source of food for grouse, which eat coniferous buds and needles. As the weather cools, ruffed grouse move from the more open alder-cottonwood river bottoms and from deciduous and coniferous mixed woodlands, into the coniferous forests to spend the winter. Blue grouse migrate uphill into the coniferous forest located on higher mountain ridges.

On more then one occasion I have been startled half to death by a grouse exploding out of the underbrush as I made my way to a river to fish. Such shocks notwithstanding, the company of birds along the stream is one of the great joys of fly fishing.