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Do you ever wonder where birds sleep? On a cold winter night, when the wind is blowing the snow sideways across the light of your street lamps, the chickadees that visited your feeder in the morning are huddling close together. Hopefully they have found a decent cavity to roost in. If your neighborhood is like mine, a dead tree is considered a hazard and is quickly removed to prevent damage to houses. The valuable cavities in a dead tree are eliminated in most urban and suburban areas where dead trees are not allowed to stand.
What can you do for the local birds that are looking for a place out of the frigid cold? Consider a roost box. While a nest box is flat inside and provides room for a nest, a roost box has a series of pegs that serve as perches with a roof overhead. Roost boxes are designed to provide a simple shelter for birds where they can sleep together with some relief from the cold and use their collective body heat to keep warm. Roost boxes often look very similar to nest boxes. Different size entrance holes provide shelter for different types of birds. A smaller hole invites smaller birds, such 
as sparrows, nuthatches and titmice, while a larger hold can accommodate flickers and small hawks. Smaller birds loose body heat very fast, but in a roost they can keep each other warm by staying close together.
Owls can use the same box they nested in as a roost box in winter. Other birds, such as chickadees, can roost in a PVC pipe roost that you can easily make yourself. Click on the picture for simple instructions on how to build a chickadee roost.
Here is a great website from Audubon Society of Omaha that provides instructions for those of you who would really like to build your own roost boxes, and nest boxes too.
While a bird feeder may provide the wintering birds with food, they also need shelter to make it 
through the winter. Roost boxes can help attract more birds to your area, and can keep them warm and safe through the cold nights.
If you want help identifying the birds around your backyard, check out Peterson Field Guide to Backyard Birds 2.0 for iPhone and iTouch. All the great illustrations and information available in the original Peterson Field Guide book, but adapted for your iPhone or iPod touch. It’s easy and fun to use, and it can help improve your birding skills, no matter what level you are at. With a roost box in your yard and Peterson for iPhone to help identify your backyard birds, you’ll enjoy a winter of birding.
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A White-crowned Sparrow could find shelter in your roost box Photo credit: Stan Tekiela |
The storms this week that brought rain and cooler weather also brought a lot of migratory birds into our city garden. Today was a busy day in the early afternoon for about an hour when one bird after another came to grab some food and a drink from 
our fountain. At one point the fountain had an avian traffic jam with a Robin, several Catbirds, a Hermit Thrush and three Cardinals (I believe our Cardinal family from this year), all trying to get their space at the watering hole. At one point we saw a Towhee, and that is when I got out the camera. I got out my iPhone and brought up my 
birds during migration if for no other reason than sometimes there are huge numbers of them. I was in Panama several seasons ago and the hawks were kettling as of thousands of them flowed into a tight formation to stay over land, battling for space over the isthmus of Panama. It’s like when the 
superhighway suddenly loses a lane and all the cars back up because they have to change the traffic flow to accommodate fewer lanes. And it is a boon to hawk watchers.
identifications.
If I am still not sure at that point, even though I probably have it narrowed down to only one or two, then I touch the information icon on the app on the birds in question so I can see the text. Sometimes there is identifying information in there that is not quickly visible in the image.
for birds of prey.
Climbing the Verrazano Bridge and dodging the attacks of Peregrine falcons while trying to band their chicks is all in a days’ work for Chris Nadareski who works for the DEP — and one of whose many jobs is keeping a sharp eye on the Peregrine population in NYC. Led by Chris, Barbara Loucks and Barbara Saunders of the DEC and our friends at The Peregrine Fund, I had the privilege of visiting one of the 15 Peregrine falcon nests in New York City. We made our way past the ventilation equipment on the 50 something floor of 
the Met Life Building to check on the status of the nest box.
eggs and it is essential to their continued survival as they need to double their depleted weight in just a couple of days to continue on their way. But, horseshoe crabs are also cheap bait and in recent years have been “harvested” in such enormous quantities that their populations are crashing. This is not good for the primitive horseshoe crab, which has managed to live in abundance for 350 million years, and it also spells destruction for the red knot. Recently, several key states where horseshoe crabs are “harvested” have instituted a moratorium on these harvests. New Jersey has kept this moratorium in place, but the courts in Delaware rejected it, bowing to the interests of the Delaware Bay fishermen who wanted to use these crabs for bait.
temperatures get near freezing I set out the “heated” birdbath. My friends think I am running a spa for birds with hot baths in winter, but the truth is this really is a lifeline for wild birds when all exposed water is frozen over.
with the heater built in, to separate heating units you can put into an existing bath. You can 
get solar powered heated baths for around $20. The ones that run on electricity aren’t terribly inexpensive (plus you’ll need an extension cord and outside electrical outlet), but if you want to help wild birds in the winter, this is a great investment. Plus you can watch them gather in your backyard or on your deck when there is no other place for them to find drinkable water!
Wild animals also need water and the ground baths are a good way for them to be able to easily get hydrated during freezing weather.
ducks, shovelers and lots of other water birds including of course, the ubiquitous Mallards and Canada geese and a lot of birds at the feeders.
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