This one’s kind of curious, not because of its appearance, since it only looks like this because it’s newly fledged, just out of the nest. No, it’s because I can’t imagine why the species has only been seen here once. This is a white-breasted nuthatch (Sitta carolinensis,) and as such, is common everywhere I’ve lived, and usually not too hard to spot – put up a bird feeder and they’ll be there within a day. So how is this the only photo of one that I’ve featured?
In checking (because on occasion, the species name changes and I’ve actually featured them countless times, but only once under a particular name,) I found plenty of nuthatch posts – only, for the brown-headed nuthatch. That’s a species that I only started seeing in NC, never realizing they existed for at least half of my life. As such, I consider them much rarer than the white-breasted above, though this is likely only personal experience and reflected in growing up with that species and seeing it constantly. And I’m sure I have plenty of pics of the white-breasted, but I simply never posted any. Huh. Some of the posts I was thinking about I realized were of the black-capped chickadee instead.
But since I’m here, I have to relate an anecdote from NY. One fall, I was looking out the window and seeing a white-breasted nuthatch perched on the pole supporting our bird feeder – nuthatches are even more adept than woodpeckers at clinging to vertical surfaces and will do it in any orientation, apparently possessing their own personal gravity. This one was perched sideways on the pole, and as I watched, the bird gave a short hop and reversed the direction it was facing, not even flipping its wings momentarily. A few seconds later it occurred to me that this wasn’t kosher; had the bird given a little hop like it appeared, it would have arced away from the pole and started falling to the ground, sideways from the bird’s perspective. Instead, it simply appeared like it had performed a short hop wile standing on the ground, only sideways. This required a full reversal of its feet at least, but the bird made it look perfectly normal. It’s the kind of thing that you want to look at in slow-motion replay, to see exactly how it was done.
I just checked; I even have a handful of images from my first digital camera, nearly four years before I had started the blog – I just never featured one here, except once. Oh well.
