The same weather I’d been complaining about during the first couple of days of our visit seemed just right for a Thanksgiving morning: cold, gray, and snow in the air is the stuff of holiday memories in the midwest, and the short drive to my grandma’s house, once we cleared the stomach-wrenching sprawl of Sarpy County, was much the same as it was 40 years ago. The birding wasn’t much different, either: a few Red-tailed Hawks and a couple of American Kestrels toughing it out on the roadsides, House Sparrows and European Starlings gathering at grain spilled at corncribs and elevators.

Just outside of Greenwood, I slowed down for two Horned Larks flying low, hoping that they might land in sight. They did, and joined a flock of 19 other birds that to our happy surprise turned out to be not larks but Lapland Longspurs, creeping in their huddled way down the middle of the gravel road before taking off and disappearing into the corn stubble.

As you might expect, we ended up spending a fair bit of time inside in Nebraska last week. But that didn’t mean we went birdless; Carolyn’s feeders were busy the whole time, and they were attracting some species I hadn’t seen in the area in good numbers since the 1980s. (I have photos, too, but they will have to wait until I can get someplace to download them; my “new old” computer is a trusty warhorse, but not up to many of these newfangled developments.)

In the 1970s, when I started birding, Purple Finches were regular and usually common winter visitors along the Missouri River; I remember a particularly big year at the end of that decade when a feeder just upstream along the Platte hosted many hundreds (no exaggeration: a couple of hundred new birds a day made their way into Ruth’s mistnets!). And then, about the time that House Finches arrived in the eastern part of the state, Purples appeared to decline; I’m not suggesting any sort of causal link, but on visits home over the last couple of decades, I could usually count on seeing many HoFis, and celebrated with each sighting of a Purple.

This year it’s different, dramatically different. In five days, Alison and I saw nary a House Finch, but Carolyn’s feeders were covered all day long with Purple Finches. I wouldn’t presume to guess how many were gobbling away, but my highest single count was of 9 birds at a time on the feeders. I wondered several times how many birds must have been at such traditional sites as Cedar Island, or Melba’s feeders in Gretna.

Oddly, Pine Siskins do not seem to have made a similar push this year (yet?); we saw only one bird, at Carolyn’s feeders, where it stayed discreetly away from the crushing bills of its purple cousins. Brown Creeper and Carolina Wren, though, could be counted on each day.

But the real prize was a woodpecker, a common eastern species that has always been uncommonish in Nebraska, but, years ago, was one we pretty much expected all winter long at favored localities. This year, Carolyn’s feeders, well stocked with suet and peanuts, are sustaining a stunning adult male Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, a bird now so infrequent in the colder parts of the year as to require review at eBird.org. I’m eager to hear how long this one sticks around, and whether perhaps he makes it through the winter, just like they did in the golden days of youth.