You may have noticed that I don’t often write about birds in my blog. This is not because I don’t see them, or that I don’t find them interesting, but because lacking any serious camera equipment, I so rarely get even a half-way decent photo of a bird. Occasionally, however, a bird comes close enough and is cooperative enough to photograph with nothing more than an iPhone camera. Some places are known for “bolder” birds and the Cape Cod National Seashore’s Beech Forest in Provincetown is definitely one of those places. I practically had birds landing on me at the start of the Beech Forest trail. 

A fairly distinctive bird, red-breasted nuthatches (Sitta canadensis) are blue-gray above and rusty below, with a sharp black bill. Their heads are well marked with a black crown, a white eyebrow, and a black eye line. Red-breasted nuthatches are present year round in Massachusetts, and in during winter they are often found in mixed flocks with black-capped chickadees and tufted titmouses and are attracted to bird feeders and bird seed. 

Although they are attracted to feeders, nuthatches (including another year round resident: the white-breasted nuthatch) are primarily bark foragers. They move deftly up, down and around tree trunks, pulling out insects from bark or seeds from cones. When moving downward they typically move in zigzag patterns, using the large claw on their one backward-pointing toe on each foot to keep their grip. By working its way down rather than up the tree, nuthatches can notice food items in upward-facing nooks that may not be obvious to “up-foraging” birds such as brown creepers and woodpeckers. In addition to foraging for edible tidbits among the bark, nuthatches also use bark crevices to store seeds and insects, often covering them with pieces of bark, lichen or pebbles. In doing so, they develop a cache of food that can help them get through the winter. They will also use bark crevices to help them open large or difficult food items; if an item is too large to eat in one piece, they will jam it into a crevice in the bark to hold it secure and then use their beaks to hammer it open.