The Red-breasted Nuthatch Winter of ’12

Our insatiable hordes of gobbling Pine Siskins have pretty much moved on, greatly to the relief of our savings account, but we’re still enjoying the sweet little Red-breasted Nuthatches that seem to have settled in for the season. They’re no less ravenous than the streaky finches, and every bit as tame. I can hardly rehang the feeder before one of the little tooters lights on it, and it’s just a matter of time before they start landing on me, too.

Lots of backyard birders in the east have been taking advantage of the birds’ tameness this fall to train them to take food from the hand. I disapprove, in my puritanically strict hands-offitude, but the dozens upon dozens of accounts of hand-feeding I’ve read over the past couple of months got me to wondering: who first figured out that you could coax wild birds to take sunflower seed directly from a human?

There’s probably no answer to that, at least not until we’ve identified the original domesticator of the chicken. Meanwhile, though, let me introduce you to young Harriet Kinsley of McGregor, Iowa.

Wilson Bulletin 27.2 (1912): 314.

Exactly a hundred years ago this fall, Harriet and her mother discovered a new bird in their yard, one that

took it for granted that he was the sole owner of the feeding table, and it took a great deal of his time trying to keep the other birds away,

among them the numerous “chickadees, downy, hairy and red-bellied woodpeckers,  juncoes, a pair of cardinals, blue jays and the white-breasted nuthatches.” Neither Harriet nor her mother had seen the species before, but they took careful note of the bird’s plumage characters:

a bluish slate-colored back with black stripes running back above each eye and the breast tinged with rufous.

Harriet looked the stranger up in her bird book, and correctly identified it as a Red-breasted Nuthatch. It was her mother’s idea to teach the bird, which was soon burdened with the inevitable nickname “Hatchie,” to eat from her hand:

One day my mother thought she would put a nut meat on her hand and see how near he would come to it. He wanted the nut very much, but was a little shy about coming down to get it ; he scolded, cocking his head first on one side and then on the other. The temptation was too great; he would risk his life: he made a swoop, lighting on her hand, and away he went with the nut. The next day we all tried the same thing and found he would take them after a great deal of scolding. We fed him every day and he gradually grew less timid.

We had to keep little piles of nuts by several of the windows so we would not have to go so far.

whose habitat is in deep, wooded ravines, [and is] very rarely … seen upon the prairie. To have one come in mid-winter, find food, even to visit the feeding-stick and linger around for three weeks, was as pleasant as it was unexpected.