Bird of the Month: White-breasted Nuthatch

Male White-breasted Nuthatch. Photo by Jeff Bryant.

By Roger Digges, CCAS Vice-President

Like January’s bird of the month, February’s lives in our area year-round. However, unlike the Red-bellied Woodpecker, the White-breasted Nuthatch is the only member of its family that calls Champaign County its permanent home.

While Red-breasted Nuthatches visit us from the north only during migration or in winter, Brown-headed Nuthatches rarely venture outside their pine forests in the southeastern US, and Pygmy Nuthatches occupy ponderosa forests in the West, White-breasted Nuthatches prefer the mature deciduous trees they find in parks, preserves, woodlots, forests, and neighborhoods in our area and throughout most of the US, parts of Canada, and Mexico.

Here in Champaign County if you’re birding or just visiting natural areas, you might find these birds hanging out in a flock with chickadees and titmice. As with many birds, you are likely to hear them before you see them. Their call is best described as a loud nasal “yank” repeated several times.

How do you know they’re White-breasted Nuthatches? It depends on where you are. If you’re visiting a woodland and see a small black, white, and gray bird with a large head and almost no neck moving along the trunk of a large tree, often but not always head first, or along a large branch, upside down or right side up, you’ve found a White-breasted Nuthatch, one of the more acrobatic members of the bird world. It’s probably probing for insects, although it may be searching for seeds. They’re quite striking and easy to see in the winter when trees have lost their leaves.

If you have bird feeders, you’re likely to draw these birds to your yard by offering them sunflower seeds, peanuts, or suet. But don’t blink. My experience has been that they only spend a few seconds at my feeders before flying to a nearby tree to crack open the kernel of a sunflower seed or hide the whole seed for future snacks. They do spend a longer time perched on my suet cakes. After you see a gray, white, and black bird make a number of quick trips back and forth from feeder to tree enough times, you’ll learn to quickly recognize a White-breasted Nuthatch.

What can be harder is determining whether it’s a male or a female. Like many of our birds of the month, White-breasted Nuthatches are sexually dimorphic as far as plumage goes, but the difference between the sexes is more subtle than those of cardinals or bluebirds or Red-Winged Blackbirds. Both males and females have white faces and breasts (hence the name), a gray back and grayish wings, and a black nape of the neck.

What’s different is the “cap” they wear. While the top of a male white-breasted nuthatch’s head is black from its nape to the base of its bill, that of a female is grayish except for a black spot at the base of its bill. Nuthatches, of course, have no trouble distinguishing between male and female.

When it’s time to nest, females look for natural tree cavities or a woodpecker hole no longer in use to lay her eggs. She may also be drawn to an artificial nesting box. If you’d like to attract a nesting pair to your property, you can find out more about constructing a nest box on the Nestwatch website. Female White-breasted Nuthatches do all the nest building in our area in late spring. They line the nest cavity or box with fur, bark, and/or lumps of dirt. On top of that they build a nest cup with grass, shredded bark, feathers, and other soft material. The females then incubate 5 to 9 eggs for about 2 weeks while the males forage for food and bring some back to them. Both parents work at keeping the insistent chicks fed until they fledge after another 4 weeks.

How are White-breasted Nuthatches doing? Quite well. The North American Breeding Survey shows that these birds have increased by 63% over the last 50 years to what Partners in Flight estimates is about 10 million birds. As with last month’s Red-bellied Woodpeckers, we would still like to preserve nesting holes for them by leaving dead trees standing (when safe) and invite them into our yards by providing nesting boxes.