Evening grosbeaks a welcome sight

An Orono resident called to report a dozen evening grosbeaks at her bird feeder last week – after years without seeing them at all.

“Thirty years ago, they were so abundant at feeders in winter, I wished they would go away. They ate so much and were so messy at the feeder. But I haven’t seen them for years. I was so happy to see three at my feeders every day. After several days, more came along, and now I have a dozen,” she said, with joy in her voice.

Male evening grosbeaks are a flashy yellow and black with a white patch on the wing. The female is mostly gray tinged with yellow with black and white wings. The bird’s head and bill are both large in proportion to the bird’s body.

The birds are being reported in small flocks statewide. Evening grosbeaks are an “irruptive” species – a species that wanders irregularly in search of a food source. They eat the seeds of ash trees and the seeds of box-elder, also known as the ash-leaf maple. They love sunflower seeds, too.

I asked my Orono friend what kind of feeder the evening grosbeaks were using, knowing that she has a plethora of feeders at her house. They were coming to a platform feeder, not the tubular kind that attracts chickadees and goldfinches. Evening grosbeaks don’t perch easily on those perches; they are too large.

I haven’t used a platform feeder for years. They are too hard to make squirrel-proof. But I’m going to get or devise one in this year of the evening grosbeak.

If you’d like to include the birds at your feeder in the Audubon Christmas Bird Counts, the Orono-Old Town count will be held on Saturday, Dec. 15, for people in those communities and also Veazie, Milford, Bradley, a bit of Bangor north of Cascade Park and Eddington.

The Bangor-Bucksport count will be held Saturday, Dec. 29, for those communities as well as Hampden, Winterport, Brewer and Orrington.

The procedure is to watch the feeder for an hour when birds are active, typically in the morning. You don’t want to include the same individual birds over and over – you want to count the number of birds that visit your feeder that day. Send your list of species and numbers to fieldspond

@maineaudubon.org.

For example: chickadees, 6; white-breasted nuthatch, 1; red-breasted nuthatches, 2; downy woodpecker, 1.

If the weather forecast is not good for the above dates, you may call the Fields Pond Audubon Center 989-2591 on the Friday before the count, before 3:30 p.m., to find out whether the count has been postponed.

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