Ruby-crowned Kinglet and White-breasted Nuthatch
As the sun rose this morning, on the first day of the New Year, layers of gray clouds blanketed the sky and the horizon, and the only signs of color were pale ribbons of yellow that soon faded. But a Carolina Wren sang a bright and optimistic song.
The whole day remained cloudy and gray, and when I first stepped outside for a walk around the middle of the afternoon, it seemed there were no birds at all in the yard or anywhere near, only stillness and cold and quiet.
It was a day in which individual sounds and movements stood out against a hushed background. At first there were only a few anonymous chips and peeps. Gradually the usual suspects showed up, though not many in any one place. The chatter and fussing of Carolina Chickadee and Tufted Titmouse; the calls of a Red-bellied Woodpecker and a Downy Woodpecker from somewhere in the woods; the song of a Carolina Wren and peeping of a Northern Cardinal from a hedge of shrubs. A Yellow-rumped Warbler flew here, another there, scattering emphatic chips as they flew. Two Eastern Bluebirds and several Chipping Sparrows flushed up from the grass along the roadside.
From down the road I heard the squeaky chatter of a Brown-headed Nuthatch. The white patch on the rump of a Northern Flicker flashed as it flew across the road and into some trees in a thicket of vines and shrubs. A tiny, round feathered ball of energy hurtled into the same weedy bushes, chattering a dry, ruffled jidit-jidit – a Ruby-crowned Kinglet, the first bird close enough to see clearly and watch. A neat gray-green little bird with sharp white wing bars and a white ring around the eye, it flitted quickly from spot to spot, flicking its wings and gleaning something from the drab leaves and branches of the privet. Its ruby-red crown was hidden so the head looked smooth and gray.
A little further up the road, a solitary and silent White-breasted Nuthatch crept down the trunk of a pecan tree, its back a clean blue-gray, its crown ink-black, its throat and face snow-white. The high, thin calls of Golden-crowned Kinglets – ti-ti-ti – whispered in the treetops, but the light was too gray and they were too high up for me to see anything but little birds moving very quickly over the branches. A few more Yellow-rumped Warblers flew from tree to tree, and a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker mewed clearly several times.
Around the wooded yard where the young Red-headed Woodpecker seems to be spending the winter, I heard its churry, rolling calls again, and saw it briefly on the broken-off standing-dead remnant of an oak that it seems to like best.
The harsh squawk of a Northern Mockingbird, the chur-wheee of an Eastern Towhee, the cries of Blue Jays now and then broke the quiet. Six American Crows flew over and cawed. In one large yard, a very small flock of Blackbirds foraged in the short brown grass under bare-limbed trees. Among them were a few Common Grackles, and others that may have been Red-winged or Rusty Blackbirds, but I was too far away to see them well.
A Red-tailed Hawk sat on top of a pole overlooking the highway below, and in the tall brown grass and weeds of the old field by the highway, as trucks and cars rushed by, one White-throated Sparrow sang.