I heard the sound of chickadees calling and walked up the path to see what they were up to. They were in a mixed flock of birds that included white-breasted nuthatches, red-breasted nuthatches, brown creepers, ruby-crowned kinglets, golden-crowned kinglets, dark-eyed juncos, bushtits, Townsend’s warblers, Steller’s jays, and a varied thrush. There was a frenzy of activity from the ground all the way into the upper part of the canopy.
The chickadees were eating the bright red honeysuckle berries! (They were also gleaning insects out of the lichen and moss on the tree branches, and eating poison oak berries. Check out the post - 09/26/23.)
The chickadees mostly swooped by or briefly hovered to snag a berry. On occasion, they would grab onto the end of the vine and pluck a berry off. Once they had the berry, they would fly over to a branch to eat it. Afterward, I would see them taking off with one of the seeds up into the tree and returning fairly quickly for another berry. Perhaps they were stashing the seeds somewhere in the tree to eat later.
It was difficult to get these photos and they aren’t the best. The chickadees were so fast at snagging the berries, and it was tricky to anticipate where they were going to be. Plus my camera wants to take its time focusing, so I took a fair amount of blurry chickadee photos as they zipped away or in-focus photos of the berries after the chickadee flew off. There are loads of honeysuckle berries before and after the incense cedar exhibit. Those are good places to post up and potentially watch them eating the berries. Good luck!
