They’re beautiful and a bit eccentric. They don’t simply dine at your feeders, they explore.
Just before she read the story my wife saw one of them move all about the back yard, checking out a cellar window, the outside faucet, our deck chairs, the clothesline (yup, my wife likes to hang out the sheets for that great fresh smell), and so on.
Ken Weber, the nature writer in our local paper did a nice column in yesterday’s paper about Carolina wrens. He lives in Rhode Island and says he’s seen some in unusual places where they nest and hide - “between panes of glass in a garage door that had been left open a couple of inches.”
He’s also seen them nest “…in Christmas wreaths left on doors, in mailboxes, in tin cans, and in pockets of jackets hanging in barns. I was showed a pair of Carolinas,” he writes, “wintering comfortably inside a big hornet’s nest that had been hung in a chicken shed. The wrens, as payment, probably kept down the fly and spider population.”
So keep an eye out. They’re in the Carolinas, southeastern U.S., and southern New England. Just the sight of these handsome little birds is enough to warm the cockles of your heart.
They are beautiful indeed and we’re blessed with having several that seem to enjoy the confines of our lot. A pair took up residence in a hanging fern basket I’d placed outside our backdoor. This is all well and good for one’s heart until you’re watering such and a bird comes flying out.
Most recently, I’d walked out front to get the paper early one morning and right when I got back to the Christmas wreath laden door, a small bird came flying out of it too, only this time in through the hearth and into the house, finally settling in the decorated tree. I briefly went through the motions of trying to shoo him/her out, and then though “Naaa, my 5 year old will find great joy in it’s presence and we’ll make a game of it’s removal.” That did turn out to be an entertaining call.
This little bird is in every aspect a wonderful neighbor.
In my case it was the Bewick’s wren, who also has that white eye stripe. Funny thing is that I had read a story about a wren last Sunday morning, and started thinking about what an odd word “wren” is, and then that very afternoon I spotted one of these little guys, which I don’t remember ever seeing before.
I like to describe the Carolina Wrens which visit our patio as “chipmunk birds” because they look so much like plump little chipmunks with very stiff tails. It just fascinates me how the Carolina Wren’s tail sticks up so high as it hops around looking for food. Once in a while the wrens eat from the feeders, mostly they just clean up food scattered by other birds.
There were a lot of Carolina wrens in Kentucky when I was a kid. They sat on wires and sang songs that sounded like “Here kitty, here kitty, here kitty, here!”
Unfortunately the brutal winter of 1977 killed most of them and it took years for the population to rebound.
Cool little birds. I had one nest in an old straw hat I had hanging from a nail under my deck. I had placed the hat there months earlier to get it out of the way one day and had never bothered to move it. Once the wren took up residency, I nailed the brim to the beam to make sure it would not fall off. The wren raised a couple of chicks and they all moved on. The hat’s still there, waiting for another bird.
I love those little guys. Of course, they’re our state bird here. I keep meaning to get a nesting box for them, such cheeky little fellows!
On other birdy fronts, all the damned time I’ve been filling that stupid goldfinch feeder with fresh seed and not one goldfinch has paid off. There were thirteen of them this morning - eight on the feeder, two waiting their turn, and two in the birdbath! Haven’t seen the Carolina wrens for a while, though - unless they’ve been coming out early, all I’ve got these days is goldfinches, house finches, and mourning doves. The doves follow the house finches like groupies because the finches are awfully picky and drop a lot of seeds on the ground for the doves. I love to watch them.
Awesome. Where do you live? If you’re in the East, you’re really lucky because Bewick’s wren is in severe decline, and has almost no breeding population east of the Mississippi anymore.
I happen to know of one breeding pair in Georgia, however, but its location is a closely guarded secret.
Nah, I’m in California, where they’re apparently still common. (Knock wood.)
meek, cool, cedar waxwings! Beautiful birds. I’ve only seen them a couple of times, when a flock stopped over in one of our trees during migration. Despite the old adage about birds of a feather, they flock together with robins, and the two very different looking birds mingling accentuate each other’s attractiveness.
What cool birds! We don’t get those guys here, but we do get black-capped chickadees, which are my favorites. We also get lots of goldfinches. The cats love them because they munch on the purple coneflowers in the butterfly garden–right outside the front window.
We don’t get as many birds in our yard in the winter (we need to plant some evergreens), so I miss them.
Have you tried putting out a feeder? We have two outside our den. One is shaped like a house if you look at in profile. The other’s a platform feeder. The Carolina wrens favor the platform feeder. So do the mourning doves. They sit in it and monopolize the platform feeder for as long as it takes to get their fill of seed.
We also have a good-sized suet feeder, with the latter being extremely popular with woodpeckers.
We thus get an ample variety of birds: cardinals, titmice, house and gold finches, black capped chickadees, Carolina wrens (as mentioned in the OP), several types of woodpeckers, northern flicker (only on occasion, sadly, but we become joyful when it shows up), blue jays, starlings, eastern towhee, piliated woodpecker, which looks like a cartoon of a bird and whose call sounds like a tropical bird.
But people in our southern states would make my list look anemic compared to the birds they get in their back yards.
I shoulda mentioned that, I guess. Yeah, we have three metal tube feeders with black oil sunflower seed, one with thistle seed, and a suet feeder. We still get birds at the feeders, but I think the little guys just feel too exposed in our naked suburban yard. There are lots of deciduous trees around–not much shelter for them there.
For the longest time I kept hearing this weird, electronic-sounding sequence of beeps outside my house. Sometimes it sounded very close by. I eventually figured out it was a bird call, but it was downright eerie to me how much it sounded like something electronic. I eventually bought a bird book that came with some CD’s with hundreds of bird calls. I went through every one until I found the mysterious electronic call, and it was the Carolina wren.
I’m on the west coast of Florida and they’re extremely common here. When I had a feeder (before the Age of the Squirrels, but we won’t get into that) I used to see them at it almost every day.
Some kind of wren once nested in the rafters of my deck. When you’d step out the back door onto the deck, you’d be confronted by this little wren, puffing up its feathers and fluttering its little wings and making little “chip” noises, which were clearly wren for “Just step away from the nest, damn you, or I’ll come over there and beat the living snot out of you.”
And of course I responded by staying away from the nest, reinforcing the wren’s self-image as a terrifyingly effective protector of the innocent.
I love the wrens! It’s amazing that such a tiny bird can live right up next to humans and be so fearless. Most of the time, when you hear them, they are scolding you to leave their nest alone, a harsh sound. But, when they sing, it’s a beautiful, sweet song. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has a nice sound link here I’ve heard more elaborate vocals than what’s on the link, though.
