Red-breasted Nuthatch

About the Red-breasted Nuthatch

The Red-breasted Nuthatch is a pocket-sized bundle of attitude from the northern spruce forests. Blue-gray above and washed rusty below, with a crisp black cap and a white eyebrow over a black eye-line, it looks like a tiny bandit -- and it behaves like one, walking headfirst down tree trunks in a way that seems to ignore gravity entirely.

Its call is half the fun: a nasal, tooting "yank-yank" like a toy tin horn, usually delivered while the bird spirals along a branch stuffing seeds into bark crevices. Nuthatches wedge food into bark and hammer it open, which is where the family name comes from.

Texas only gets this bird in irruption years -- winters when the cone crop fails up north and Red-breasted Nuthatches flood south by the thousands. The winter of 2022-23 was one of the big flights, with birds turning up in pines and junipers all over the state. Mine were photographed at Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley State Park in December 2022, about as far south as the invasion reached.

In an irruption winter, check every feeder and every pine. A bird that answers a squeak with that tin-horn call and marches straight down the trunk toward you is the easiest photo subject of the season.