[cobirds] Red-breasted Nuthatch

All,

For what it's worth, all 3 nuthatch species have moved into Laramie is pretty large numbers this fall. We almost never get White-breasted or Pygmy in town, and I rarely see either away from Ponderosa Pine around here (in my comparatively limited time in CO, I tend to strongly associate both species with Ponderosa). I even had a Pygmy Nuthatch in a high elevation spruce - Doug-fir forest in the Snowy Range, which is quite strange in my experience. Red-breasteds are much more abundant in town than normal this fall.

Curiously, type 2 or Ponderosa Pine Crossbills are also moving through in large flocks, and there is a mass movement of this call type (and types 3 and 4) into the Great Lakes region and the Northeast.

I'm tempted to speculate that this could all be tied to the virtual absence of good conifer cone crops (especially Ponderosa) throughout much of the Rockies. While scouting for possible crossbill field sites this fall, I've traveled around a lot of WY and CO, talked to several of you and folks in SD, ID, MT, and UT and have not been able to find a good cone crop anywhere. The only conifer that has seed this fall across much of the Rockies is Lodgepole, the cones of which none of these taxa feed on a lot in my experience. I also wonder if Doug-fir and Western Hemlock cone crops (the preferred food of types 4 and 3, respectively) are failing across much of the Pacific Northwest, though I've yet to look into that.

Just some thoughts that may or may not be totally bogus.

Good birding,
Cody Porter
(not doing fieldwork in Laramie, WY)

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