Feeder birds - the size advantage

Today I was standing at the kitchen sink soaking my fingernail, the one that got blackened when I was laying flagstones in the new walkway, and looking out the window. The seed feeder and suet cage are in the small red pine outside the window, strategically placed so that anyone can watch from the kitchen window. They had both been empty for a while, and it wasn’t until a couple of days ago that I got round to pouring the seeds in and putting a suet cake in the cage feeder. While I was working outside, moving soil and bits of sod to fill in next to the walkway and helping Lorraine prune the magnolia, it struck me that birds didn’t seem to be coming to the feeder; that is, the seed level was not dropping the way it did a few weeks ago when a small flock of about two dozen blue jays regularly and noisily visited, along with a red squirrel who hung onto the feeder and the seed bell I had hung, and helped themselves until everything was gone.

So while I soaked my fingernail, I watched the feeders. Within a minute or so, three chickadees showed up and took turns hanging on the suet cage and pecking at the cake or picking seeds carefully from the tray of the feeder and flying off to eat them. They were delicately beautiful, the way chickadees always are, and I was happy just to watch them, since I had to soak my fingernail anyway and their activity was consistently engaging.

Within another minute or so, I saw a flick of movement behind the trunk of the pine. Almost immediately a small woodpecker worked its way around the trunk, looked at the suet cage, and flew over to it. The move was aggressive and it was a bigger bird, so the chickadees quickly flew off to different branches and left the woodpecker to address the suet. I admired its agility, the white stripes on its black wing feathers, and the shape of the white patch on its back. It made me wonder whether this was a downy or a hairy woodpecker, since they are exactly alike except for size and beak shape, and I hadn't seen either kind for a while.

I didn’t have long to wonder about it because a pair of my much larger blue jay buddies showed up in their cocky blue and grey splendour. Their moves were as aggressive as the woodpecker’s had been, and it was gone in an instant, so they proceeded to chase each other away until one decided there were enough scraps on the ground that it wasn’t worth fighting for a spot on the cage. So I watched these two beautiful birds working the territory, but again it didn’t last long.

Another woodpecker, much bigger than the first one (which was, then, clearly a downy), landed on the pine trunk and flew right over to the suet cage. I realized that this one, a hairy woodpecker, was almost exactly the same body size as the jay that was on the other side of the feeder. Here, for the first time, there was no size differential, and surprisingly – for me at least – the two birds shared the little suet cage. Of course I didn’t have the camera close by to catch the two together, but I did catch each of them clinging to the cage.

And that’s really all. There were no bigger birds to chase either of them away from the feeder, and my fingernail had likely soaked long enough, so I dumped the water and took one last look out the window. The blue jays and the hairy woodpecker were gone, but a pretty little chickadee was there pecking carefully at the suet cake.