Outside Our Door

…it places its nest at a great height, sometimes fifty feet, attaching it to the twigs of a forked branch. Here the nest is small, thin but compact, composed of the slender stems of dried grasses mixed with coarse fibrous roots and the exuviae of caterpillars or other insects, and lined with the hair of the deer, moose, racoon, or other animals, delicate fibrous roots, wool, and feathers.

~John James Audubon

Audubon called this little bird the Pine-creeping Wood Warbler because of its preference for pine trees and its feeding habits – creeping along the branches and trunks searching for insects. It is the common winter warbler in our woods and readily comes to our suet feeders, often in group of three or four at a time (I have seen as many as seven at once waiting to get to the suet cage). Now that is nesting season, they are less frequent visitors. Instead, we are hearing the male’s trill throughout the day as he defends territory. According to research online, surprisingly little is known of the nesting behavior of this common warbler, probably because of its propensity to nest high (30 – 75 ft) out on the branches of pine trees.

But this week, a female has been visiting a patch in our vegetable garden just outside our kitchen door. I saw her on three occasions, gathering nesting material in the same spot. She intently picked through the straw, leaves, and old stems in about a one square foot spot, filled her beak, and then flew off. We watched as she made a couple of stops (typical behavior as the female heads toward her nest site so as to not give away where it is located) and then disappeared across the road to a stand of tall pines about a hundred yards away. On one of her visits, I slowly cracked open the kitchen door, stood on my tip toes to get over the edge of the side porch, pointed the camera down and took a few images as she searched.