The harbingers of winter will be back soon
Summertime is falling down, winter is closing in. The juncos — what Audubon called snowbirds — will be back soon.
“We think of harbingers of spring,” said Ken Elkins, director of education at Audubon Connecticut’s Bent of the River nature center in Southbury. “Juncos are harbingers of winter.”
“When I see them, I think ‘the fall migration is over,’ ” said Patrick Comins, president of the Connecticut Audubon Society.
These little hoppers, flocking at backyard feeders to take fallen sunflower seeds, are so much a part of the late fall and winter that it’s easy to take them for granted — little gray jobbies.
But they’re remarkable in many ways.
In North America, one species — Junco hyemalis, the darkeyed junco — has evolved into six very differentlooking subspecies. The slatecolored junco — the one we see — has very different plumage than its pinksided, redbacked or Oregon junco cousins out west.
“Even the ones we see can be different,” Elkins said. “Some females can look a lot like female pinksided juncos. But they’re not.”
Until the 1970s, they were considered six different species. Ornithologists consider them the North American equivalent of Darwin’s finches — proof before our eyes of evolution in action.
“They look very different from place to place,” said Ellen Ketterson, professor of biology at Indiana State University at Bloomington, who has been studying juncos for nearly a halfcentury. “But they’re still one species.”
And they’re in trouble. It’s hard to see this because they’re still plentiful, with hundreds of millions across the continent. They’re at the top of the list throughout North America in reports to Project Feeder Watch, the citizen science project that monitors backyard birds.
But last month, an article in the journal Science estimated that in the last half century the overall bird population in North America has declined by about three billion birds — one in four.
Ketterson said juncos are one of the species that’s been hit hard by a combination of factors: habitat loss, the use of pesticides, cat predation and collisions with buildings.
“We think of harbingers of spring. Juncos are harbingers of winter.”
Ken Elkins, director of education at Audubon Connecticut’s Bent of the River nature center in Southbury
“There are 186 million fewer than there were in 1970,” she said. “It’s disturbing to me.”
Juncos are part of the sparrow family. There are a few spots in the northern tier of the state where juncos breed and stay yearround, Comins said.
Some of these resident birds may show up at feeders, but the greatest numbers migrate south from the coniferous forests in Canada and Alaska where they summer, breed and nest.
In the Rocky Mountain states, the pattern is different. Juncos summer high up in the mountains’ piney woods to breed, then come down to lower elevations for the winter. Four of the six junco subspecies are in the Rockies.
“My sister lives in Denver,” said Elkins of the Bent of the River center. “In the winter, she can get three or four different juncos at her feeder.”
Ornithologists studying slatecolored junco migration patterns have learned that females leave their breeding grounds earlier and travel farther south than males.
Males rough it out in colder climes for a reason: When spring comes, they’re closer to the north woods. In spring, they can hurry back there to establish their breeding territories.
Juncos also tend to winter in the same places each year. The birds at your winter feeder this year may include some you’ve seen in years past. They roost at night in evergreen trees, tall grasses and brush piles.
Once here, each flock sets up a pecking order. Older males boss it over younger males. Older females are on the next rung down, with younger females at the bottom. When you see juncos hopping in and out under your feeder, white tails flashing, it’s to determine who gets to eat first.
Right now, junco fans are waiting for their arrival here. Cathy Hagadorn, executive director of Connecticut Audubon’s Deer Pond Farm center in Sherman, said they’ve had big flocks of robins. But not juncos.
Margaret Robbins, owner of the Wild Bird Unlimited store in Brookfield, is hearing the same thing.
“No reports here at all,” she said. “It’s late.”
One reason for this may simply be that the wet spring we had gave us healthy weeds and wildflowers with abundant seeds to offer.
“People should check out the edges of their gardens,” Elkins said. “It’s a great place to find fall birds.”