Bird of the Month
by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd
No woodland songster is more likely than the nuthatch ( Sitta europaea) to provoke – by its full-blooded, far-carrying lasso of a call – a ‘What the heck is that?’ or even ‘Who the heck is that?’ since the signature call could be a half wolf whistle.
As W H Hudson wrote, ‘Without being a songster in the strictest sense… his voice is so clear and far-reaching, and of so pleasant a quality, that it often gives more life and spirit to the woods and orchards and avenues he frequents than that of many true melodists’ ( British Birds).
In summer showers a skreeking noise is heard Deep in the woods of some uncommon bird It makes a loud and long and loud continued noise And often stops the speed of men and boys They think somebody mocks and goes along And never thinks the nuthatch makes the song (John Clare, from ‘The Nuthatch’)
Birds tend to cease singing at human approach; not the nuthatch. It can stand its ground and give full vent only feet away. The power of its unmodulated cry at close range is penetrating.
Persuading it to feed from the hand takes more patience. Even where birds trust strangers offering food, there will be a dozen visits from great tits to every one from a nuthatch. The great tit will linger long enough to swallow a couple of nibbles before swooping off. The nuthatch’s flight is as straight as its call. It will arrive unannounced from a distance; then zoom to a high branch to peck its prize at leisure. If there are plentiful trees nearby, nuthatches also come to garden feeders and bird tables.
Quick, at the feeder, pausing Upside down, in its beak A sunflower seed held tight To glance by chestnut, dust blue, White, an eye-streak Gone in a blurred ripple Straight to the cedar branch To the trunk to a crevice In bark and putting it In there, quick, with the others, Then arrowing straight back For just one more all morning. ( David Wagoner, ‘Nuthatch’)
Nuthatches are the only British birds with the squirrel-like ability to scurry down and round trunks and branches as well as up. The name, also more descriptively ‘nut hacker’, comes from their habit of wedging hazelnuts or acorns in cracks and then hacking them open. Gilbert White ( Natural History of Selborne) discovered that the ‘jarbird’, as referred to by Hampshire rustics, which made ‘a clatter with its bill against a dead bough or some old pales’, was the nuthatch. He added that the ‘noise may be heard a furlong or more’. For a small, if chunky, bird, nut-hacking demands a super-strong beak. The black eye-stripe, which divides its harmoniously tonal colouring, gives a bandit touch suitable to its boldness.
Wonderful to report, breeding numbers are rocketing in England, Wales and now southern Scotland – it was first seen north of the border in 1989. Only Ireland is un-nuthatched.