Juncos talk with their tails

Many people with a bird feeder say they can’t identify sparrows. If that’s you, give yourself some credit – juncos are sparrows, and they are easy to identify. They are little, dark gray birds that feed on the ground. They have a white belly and a little light pink bill. Their tail is dark gray, with a little white on the sides.

Last week, large numbers of juncos came in from the north. I’ve been seeing 50 juncos at my feeder eating millet, 20 at the Fields Pond Audubon Center at the feeder eating millet, and many more eating goldenrod seeds in the fields. I estimated 400 juncos along a 20-mile stretch of back road, in flocks of 20 or more. Juncos are easy to identify, with those outer white feathers visible as they fly away from the road. The juncos were feeding on weed seeds on the shoulder of the road.

Recently, I was with a Bangor Land Trust group, learning nature photography from Joni Dunn of Bangor Photo. We saw a junco bathing in a puddle. It was a comical sight.

The junco would crouch down in the water, and then vibrate its wings in the water, sending a shower of drops all around itself. I got a blurry photo of it, surrounded by water drops all around. Its head was down in the water, its tail up in the air, with two white feathers on each side of its tail.

Those two outer white feathers make the junco’s tail very conspicuous. The tail does a lot of communicating. When juncos fly away, the white feathers say “follow me.” When one bird feels crowded, it runs toward the offender with its tail spread – the white conspicuous – and chases it away. The tail says, “Go away!” When a male courts a female in the spring, he follows her, wings low, tail high and spread. The tail says, “Look at me!”

If Christmas bird counters are lucky, we’ll find 20 or 30 juncos still in the Bangor area on Christmas Count Day. The rest go south, from Portland to Massachusetts to Virginia, Alabama and points between.

For information on Fields Pond Audubon Center, call 989-2591.