White-breasted nuthatch

The white-breasted nuthatch is a small songbird common across much of temperate North America. It has a black cap, white face, chest, and flanks, blue-gray upperparts, and a chestnut lower belly. The male’s mating song is a rapid nasal qui-qui-que-quo uttered up to 30 times a minute.

About White-breasted nuthatch in brief

The white-breasted nuthatch is a small songbird common across much of temperate North America. It has a black cap, white face, chest, and flanks, blue-gray upperparts, and a chestnut lower belly. Its nine subspecies differ mainly in the color of the body plumage. Like other nuthatches, it forages for insects on trunks and branches and is able to move head-first down trees. Seeds form a substantial part of its winter diet, as do acorns and hickory nuts stored in the fall. The nest is in a hole in a tree, and the breeding pair may smear insects around the entrance as a deterrent to squirrels. Predators include hawks, owls, and snakes. Forest clearance may lead to local habitat loss, but there are no major conservation concerns over most of its range. The male’s mating song is a rapid nasal qui-qui-que-quo, uttered up to 30 times a minute. A more distinctive sound is shrill kri-krikri, repeated rapidly with mounting anxiety or excitement, or a higher, faster yididititit call, more nasal and faster than the bee-like call of the Pacific bee-biting bird.

It is 13–14 cm long, with a wingspan of 20–27 cm and a weight of 18–30 g. The adult male of the nominate subspecies, S. c. carolinensis, has pale blue- gray upperparts,. a glossy black cap, and a black band on the upper back. The wing coverts and flight feathers are very dark gray with paler fringes, and the closed wing is pale gray and black with a thin white wing bar. The outer tail feathers are black with broad diagonal white bands across the outer three feathers, a feature readily visible in flight. Juveniles are similar to the adult, but duller plumaged. In the northeastern United States, at least 10% of females have black caps, but the proportion rises to 40–80% in the Rocky Mountains, Mexico and the southeastern U.S. S. przewalskii, formerly regarded as possibly conspecific with it, turned out to be basal in the family. A molecular phylogeny published in 2014 and including all main species’ lineages within nuthatching concluded that the white- breasted n Ruthatch was more closely related to the giant nuthATCH than to S.  przewskii.

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