A TIME WHEN BUSHTITS GATHER TOGETHER

Rex Burress

I found it so delightfully charming to see a flock of 30 bushtits searching the Toyon Christmas Berry bushes before Christmas recently. It was suggestive of the coming Christmas season to see the feisty birds near the Feather River Nature Center on the first day of December!

At a time when days bulge with darkness and autumnal colors fade away into what could be thought of as dreary drabness, there are the birds to lift us into a cheerier frame of mind. The bushtits in the bushes and the buffleheads on the river are a cheerful presence, even in the midst of stormy weather-- one a resident of the riverside, and the other a migratory visitor adhering to the water.

Bushtits, especially, show a jauntiness as they joyfully seek lingering insects and aphid eggs hidden in the branches. Their diminutive size adds a special degree of admiration to their promenade from one shrub to another, swiftly breaking away one by one in a feathered stream until they all are clustered at the next stop for a moment, fleecing the chosen target for edible things. Then one “leader?” breaks away and they all follow like sheep to the pen or a bee swarm following the guide. I wonder why bushtits bunch together in winter? Come spring, pairs will break away to nest.

Winter is a time of togetherness for many creatures of the wild, perhaps taking comfort in unity, even as people lean on one another in times of unknown perils during weather extremes or at events like Christmas observances. Among the birds, blackbirds and crows are of the social gathering types, and on an even larger scale, the masses of migratory waterfowl is an ultimate intermingling.

Various hawks are among solitaire hunters that hang around in milder CA climates, but turkey vultures that bunch along the river to feed on the salmon die-off in the fall, sail on south, as do most Midwest birds of prey and insect hunters when snow covers the ground.

Among the more solitary sort, the shy hermit thrush can be found alone in the dense thickets around the nature center most any time, occupying the ground cover even as the bushtit neighbors ruffle the higher canopy.

On that particular first day of December, some damp, cool weather had freshened the mosses to reveal their vivid yellow-green stage, and left dew-drops lingering on the Christmas Berry leaves. When the bushtits sank out of sight into the glistening shrub, a shower of water was shaken loose like a small rain. The toyon's intensely red berries are one of nature's showpieces in mid-winter, arriving just in time to decorate the somber woods along the Feather River--a native evergreen plant regal in green and red array. The edible berries, at least for wild animals, are not for the bushtit's tiny beak, but robins and waxwings can eat them. Most poison things--baneberry, hemlock, poison oak, rattlesnakes, bees--are all in their winter retreats, except for death cap mushrooms that spike the autumnal woods before frosts...when there is a time of warm rains.

Hide and seek, or hide and sleep; it's the winter game of survival for many species. There is also hiding and seeking competition for the active animals. Other canopy birds flood in from the north, especially the warblers and kinglets, seeking the same things the bushtits depend on, only a little higher in the branches. Seek and ye shall find; watch and ye shall see! To be alert in the wild is to live.

Dripping woodlands and waterproof wings/Red berries and sparkling things,/Help make the season a lovelier sight,/Illuminating the darkness in touches of light.

“Nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own, and from morning to night, as from the cradle to the grave, is but a succession of changes so gentle and easy that we can scarcely mark their progress.” --Charles Dickens