Get ready for new visitors from the north this season

They get the urge for going.

Maybe, with luck, some of their going involves coming here.

This fall and winter, there’s a chance that irruptive birds from the Canadian boreal forests will move south in good numbers. Which means backyard feeder usual suspects may get some uncommon company — common redpolls, pine siskins, purple finches.

Maybe — cross your fingers — there will even be evening grosbeaks, in all their yellow, black and white glory, scarfing down black-oiled sunflower seeds. There could even be red crossbills, pine grosbeaks or Bohemian waxwings.

“It might be,” said Patrick Comins, executive director of the Connecticut Audubon Society

“I hope to see them,” said Phillip Robbins of Wild Birds Unlimited, a birding shop in Brookfield.

When it happens, he said, the human chatter in the store picks up.

“People come in and they get excited at seeing new birds,” he said.

It’s all a bit of a crapshoot — wind, weather, seeds and berries to our north — can keep these species from our state. The battering the Maritime Provinces took from Hurricane Fiona in September may disrupt food supplies there, bringing more birds to New England.

But according to the Finch Research Network in Canada, led by ornithologist Tyler Hoar, there’s a good chance we’ll see at least some of these birds.

“In eastern North America westward to northwestern Ontario and the upper midwestern states, there should be a flight year for several species,’’ Hoar wrote in his prediction for the coming winter finch season. His full report is at https:// finchnetwork.org/winterfinch-forecast-2022-2023

These birds live in the Far North Woods in Canada and while they migrate south in winter, they don’t usually travel across the border.

But if cone, seed and fruit crops are poor in their usual wintering grounds, they can come south, often in flocks. I had a gathering of redpolls at my feeder on Christmas morning in 2012. It was a present I still dote on.

“In November 2020, we had so many pine siskins here that they weren’t just eating at our bird feeders, they were eating seeds out of our hands,” said Ryan MacLean, bird education specialist at the Greenwich Audubon Center, owned by Audubon Connecticut.

MacLean said he’s heard purple finches singing as they’ve flown over the Greenwich Center this fall, indicating they’re already on the move.

Both MacLean and Ken Elkins — director of Connecticut Audubon Society’s Coastal Center at Milford Point — said they’ve also been seeing and hearing red-breasted nuthatches along the coast. That’s a good sign other irruptive species may follow.

“We’ve had red-breasted nuthatches here as early as August,” Elkins said.

It’s not only too little food that brings irruptive species south. Sometimes, if there’s double rations, there’s lots of food to feed babies. Larger flocks —moving to find more food — result.

That’s what’s happened this year. There’s been an outbreak of spruce budworms in the Canadian spruce forests, Hoar writes in his report, giving some species — including purple finches and evening grosbeaks – plentiful worm and larvae sustenance.

The same may hold true for snowy owls. They live out on the Arctic tundra, depending on lemmings for their main food source. Lemmings have boomand-bust reproductive cycles — lots scurrying some years, almost none the next.

In the boom years, snowy owls can feed their owlets well. That creates larger flocks. In the winter, some head south and end in un-Arctic places like Connecticut

Purple finches and redbreasted nuthatches move early. Woe to those of us who live in black bear country and will not put feeders out until late November, lest we feed the bears, then bear witness to the mayhem they create knocking feeders down and around.

People have already sighted red crossbills in the northernmost towns of Litchfield County — Norfolk, Colebrook, and North Canaan. They’re striking birds — the males rosy-red and black-winged, the females paler and drab, but both with bills that cross at their tips, the better to crack cone seeds with.

But MacLean of the Greenwich Audubon Center said it’s possible — albeit not proven — that red crossbills are now breeding in the state.

“They were seen in those towns in the summer.’’ he said.

So, when you put your feeders out this fall, keep your binoculars and field guides handy and your feeders stocked with black-oil sunflower seed and Niger seeds. Then hope for something special around the holidays.

“We’ll really know by the Christmas Bird Count,” MacLean said.

Contributed photo A common redpoll perches on a feeder in Stamford in January 2013. Hurricane Fiona’s impact on Canada’s Maritime Provinces may send common redpolls and other birds south to Connecticut, where they are not commonly seen.