Recently as I left the house in the first light of morning, I heard a sound as welcome as the rush of running water in March and April. It came from high overhead, and though I couldn’t pinpoint it in the still-gray treetops, I knew immediately what it was. It was the unmistakable four-note call of a northern cardinal.

Bird experts use words or sounds from our own language to help us grasp the sound of a bird’s call. The bird

guide description

“What

cheer … cheer … cheer …” fits perfectly. It is a lilting, cheering song that tells me that cardinals are getting in the mood for “family life,” and thus – despite what the calendar says – perhaps spring-like weather isn’t too far away.

Bird books may tell you that cardinals sing more the year-round than most songbirds. But what we’re beginning to hear from cardinals now is a definite late winter-early spring behavior, a treetop serenade at an hour when there are few other songbird voices to be heard.

Another getting-readyfor

spring signal is the behavior of the neighborhood’s gray squirrels. I’ve been seeing what might best be described as “pairing play,” a tussling and chasing that differs from the more business-like foraging seen through most of the winter. “Pre-nuptial pursuit” might be another way to describe it.

I watched one large gray as it balanced in the branches of bare backyard shrubbery. In its mouth were a half dozen sticks of various sizes, and among them several strands of long grass. It was a minor comedy watching this squirrel try to navigate from branch to branch with its jaws clamped on a mouthful of nest making materials. This would not be my idea of a cushy nest in which to give birth to squirrel kits, but life is not quite as soft in the world of the gray squirrel as it is in ours.

Bird feeder pecking

order

The term “pecking order” is widely used to describe rank among animals that have an organized social hierarchy. But for the record, the expression dates to the 1920s, and observations of social behavior in poultry in Germany. Defense and aggression – and one’s position in the barnyard social order – were observed to be determined by a bird

pecking with its beak.

Today, we use the term “pecking order” to describe

who is in charge, who are the followers and what is their status, or rank. We use it in our own human society, and in reference to other social animals – canines, for example – without ever thinking that for creatures without a beak, there’s no way to establish an order by pecking.

One place we see true pecking order is at our backyard bird feeders. I pause frequently near the family room windows that look out on ours. In particular, I watch the wooden feeder with the wire mesh, into which we stuff lumps of suet.

This feeder has shown me that creatures that have a “bird brain” can recognize a good thing when they find it. In addition to the birds with reputations as suet lovers, like the woodpeckers, nuthatches, chickadees and jays, I see more and more other species finding their way to that section of the backyard food court for a helping of high-energy fats.

We have many and various woodpeckers that visit our backyard. Tiny down woodpeckers, and the slightly larger copy known as the hairy woodpecker, are the most common, each a study in barred and spotted black and white, with a bright red accent at the back of their head like a cavalier’s plume.

We’re also visited regularly by gigantic, crowsized, crested pileated woodpeckers. Odd considering their dominant size, they’re extremely nervous and skittish, and take flight at the slightest disturbance. A less common visitor is the robin-sized redbellied woodpecker, which has gradually expanded its range northward to include northern tier states like Minnesota, and eastward to New York and New England.

The red-bellied is poorly

named, for it has – at most – a rosy tinge to its formal wear-gray breast. But it does have a brilliant red cap that extends down the nape of its neck. Like so many woodpeckers, the red-bellied is also barred black and white on its back. It is one of the few woodpeckers known to regularly store food.

One recent morning I watched a rotation of downy and hairy woodpeckers alight in the crabapple tree, then hop to the feeder for a beak-full of suet. As I watched, a red-bellied woodpecker landed on the tree’s trunk, its smaller cousins quickly made way, and the newcomer “bellied up” to the suet bar.

Soon after, a blue jay landed on a branch above, and I expected to see the woodpecker concede his place to the jay, a bird with a bully’s reputation for dominating other songbirds. To my surprise, as the blue jay hopped toward the suet, the red-bellied woodpecker lunged toward it, beak-first. The jay, uncharacteristically put in its place, hopped back, then took wing and left the suet to the woodpecker, this one obviously higher in the pecking order.