Garden > Birds > Nuthatch

I have mixed feelings about nuthatches. At our religiously filled feeding station the nuthatch is like a badly behaved youth – carelessly spraying seed left and right until it finds the one single seed that takes its fancy, regardless of the fact that it’s the exact same type of seed as every other one that it’s so off-handedly discarded. But then again, there’s something to be said for a bird that goes its own way and while the rest of the bird population climbs trees from bottom to top, there is the nuthatch working its way down a tree-trunk head first – bless it, it just goes against the grain and as a lesbian, something about that little trait vaguely endears this little bird to me.

It’s good looking too and being the fickle type that I am, it tends to score points in that department as well, for who can resist the colourful grey-blue, rusty-red and white plumage combined with its Zorro-type black eye-stripe that is the signature of our own British based nuthatch?

Nuthatches got their name apparently from the term ‘nut hack’ – because these birds have a habit of wedging a nut into a crevice of a tree-trunk and then ‘hacking’ at it until it opened – so they’re not lacking in the brain department either. It is this hacking habit though that also results in it being often likened in appearance to a mini-woodpecker although never having seen it ‘hacking’ I don’t see the resemblance myself!

Nuthatches are home birds – pairs will defend their territories through the winter and their young never venture very far from the woods where they hatched. There are 130,000 breeding territories in Britain and since the 1970s numbers have been rising and territories gradually spreading – sightings of breeding nuthatches have now been spotted in parts of Scotland. They have also become more and more visible in gardens and at feeders – liking peanuts and seeds in winter – when the natural abundance of spiders and beetles are lower.

We couldn’t find any myths and legends associated with nuthatches but we did find a few little nick-names that have been used for them in the past – the upside-down bird for one, tomtit for another. The Americans have managed to call the red-breasted nuthatch that is resident in North America ‘little quank’ and ‘cardy-bird’ but the origins of such names remain, quite frankly, a complete mystery to me. If anyone can shed light on them please feel free to enlighten me!

Nuthatch statistics (source RSPB):

• Nuthatches lay 6-9 eggs at a time – usually in April/May
• They might produce 2 broods a season
• It is the female that incubates the eggs for 14-15 days
• Both parents take on responsibility for feeding their young
• They are approximately 14cm long
• The oldest known wild nuthatch lived for 11 years
• Nuthatches are resident birds which means you will see it all year round
• Nests are usually natural holes in trees although they have occasionally been known to use nestboxes
• The female will pack the hole to its nest with mud reducing the size of the entry in an attempt to prevent larger birds raiding the nest
• No other British bird descends a tree trunk head first!