The Elusive Quest: Finally, Pictures of a Red-Breasted Nuthatch

What a week! Back from a trip across the Sierra Nevada, I arrived home and made some interesting personal discoveries, including a Red-breasted Sapsucker on the Tuolumne, and the first sightings of Snow Geese and Greater White-fronted Geese on the same day. And then there was this morning...

Some birds are very rare, and I'll never see them at all, and there are some birds that are around, but I just never catch them. The Red-breasted Nuthatch (Sitta canadensis) is one of those birds. Prior to this year I had only seen one, a chance sighting in 2018 at Modesto Junior College. Ever since, I've been trying to see another, hoping to get better pictures than the fuzzy ones I got last year. My interest was piqued when local birders starting using the term 'irruption' in discussing the nuthatches. It seems that when major food sources fail in the normal home range of the bird, they will spread into new areas, and some suspected that we were in the midst of one based on a fairly high number of local sightings. So my 'spidey-sense' was on high alert.

I finally spotted one two weeks ago on campus, but I was victimized by a failing zoom lens on my camera (since replaced), and I only got two very poor pictures that served only to prove the identity of the bird. But this morning I was following the movements of some Cedar Waxwings when my eye caught movement in the deodar tree at my side. My new camera was working, and I finally got some reasonably sharp pictures of the beautiful little bird.

The nuthatches gained their name from their habit of jamming nuts into the bark of trees, and breaking loose the edible parts ("hatching" the seed). They also spend their time walking up and down the trucks of trees searching out bugs and spiders. They are found all over the United States and Canada, except by me; I don't find them very often. But on this day I got lucky!