Piedmont Birds in November
By November, the song of the wood thrush has disappeared,
replaced by the melodic tune of the hermit thrush. Juncos and a number of
sparrows, including tree, fox, white-throated and white-crowned sparrows have
returned. Brown creepers will start showing up on tree trunks, along with
winter wrens (smaller and more shy than our year-round Carolina wrens), and
well-drilling yellow-bellied
sapsuckers. You may also see more duck species, especially common golden-eyes
and hooded mergansers. If you are very lucky, you might catch a glimpse of
short-eared or northern saw-whet owls, which are sometimes spied in the
Triangle during the winter months.
In mid-November, you might find pine-siskins flocking to
feeders, mixed with year-round resident goldfinches and migratory purple
finches. At the end of the month, look for golden-crowned
kinglets (Regulus satrapa). Rusty blackbirds
(Euphagus carolinus) also return to
the Piedmont in mid-November, spied amongst flocks of grackles and starlings.
According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, over the past forty years rusty
blackbird populations have declined between 85% and 99% and scientists don’t
yet know why. Some researchers from the International
Rusty Blackbird Technical Working Group suspect that this decline is
related to the species strict reliance on disappearing wooded wetland habitat.
If you aren’t able to find siskins and kinglets, you should
be able to observe hawks flying high overhead or low through the forest. In the
Piedmont, we have two fast-flying forest hawks, or Accipiters: the Cooper’s
hawk (Accipiter cooperii) and the
sharp-shinned hawk (Accipiter striatus).
From afar, these two species are difficult to tell apart. Adults of both
species are bluish-gray above with banded tails with rusty-barred breasts.
Cooper’s hawks are larger than sharp-shinned hawks, but size can be difficult to
estimate in the field. Moreover, both species feed primarily on birds. While
the sharp-shinned hawk preys almost entire upon birds, the Cooper’s hawk will
also take a number of small mammals.
References:
Cook, Dave. 2001. The Piedmont Almanac. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Mystic Crow
Publishing.
Ehrlich, P., D.
Dobkin, and D. Wheye (1988). The Birder's
Handbook. New York :
Simon & Schuster.
