October marks harvest’s end. Only stubble stands in most area fields, corn shelled, beans cut.
In our yard, though, harvest continues, as reapers labor dawn to dusk. Some cache crops; some eat all they gather. Some harvesters are immigrants — very much legal — the rest are locals. All wear feathers. And crop preferences vary.
Some like apples, now mostly rotten, hole-bored or shredded, pecked apart and gobbled down by red-bellied and downy woodpeckers. Cardinals work the orchard as well, alongside migrants looking for bugs.
Crabapples, plentiful this year, hang overripe on otherwise nearly bare trees. So it’s easy to watch goldfinches, vegetarians that they are, gleefully harvesting fruit, clinging upside down. House finches, occasional downy woodpeckers, and mockingbirds pick, too. As mockers stake out winter food territories, they surely measure crabapple potential — and seek other, more lasting buffets.
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Dogwood berries, one of our yard’s most abundant, popular crops, bring the biggest mix of harvesters. Count robins, mockingbirds, cardinals, goldfinches, flickers, red-bellied woodpeckers, downy and hairy woodpeckers, and even a surprising pileated woodpecker among them.
Earlier, summer tanagers joined the fray as did a few migrating warblers, all sifting through the berries, sampling the ripest, but also checking for bugs.
This year, oaks produced ample mast crops. While squirrels stash acorns where they will, eight raucous blue jays surely win the acorn-harvesting prize. They’ve winged a path between the oaks and the badly ice-damaged pine along our property's edge where they find myriad stashing places among the broken branches, secreting away acorns, a harvest stored against bad times. As pecans pop from hulls and fall, jays add them to their caches, as well.
Even grass seeds draw harvesters. Two dozen chipping sparrows work through short grasses, popping up to snare six-inch stems, pulling them down with their weight, methodically harvesting the seeds.
Shortly, native switchgrass will attract late-staying indigo buntings, fattening up before migrating. Song, white-throated, white-crowned, and Lincoln’s sparrows will join the grass-seed picking crew and then in a few weeks dark-eyed juncos will join.
Even the drought-ridden spent flower garden draws a harvester parade. Goldfinches pick apart black-eyed susan seed heads, shaking 4-foot-tall stalks as they glean their way through the patch. Assorted sparrows forage actively for spilled seeds below.
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Native beautyberry bushes, laden with clusters of lavender bead-like berries, draw a nice range of immigrant harvesters, including Tennessee warblers, as well as robins, cardinals and mockingbirds.
Pokeweed and Virginia creeper berries, even shriveled from dry weather, still draw an array of harvesters, and purple droppings around water features attest to the berries’ popularity.
But even as early fall crops disappear, more is yet to come. Native winterberries will fully ripen soon. Still later, after freezing temperatures soften the fruits, holly berries will become the prime crop. So, the harvest will continue. And how I love watching the harvesters.
For more information about birds and bird habitat, see Sharon Sorenson's books How Birds Behave, Birds in the Yard Month by Month, and Planting Native to Attract Birds to Your Yard. Check her website at birdsintheyard.com, follow daily bird activity on Facebook at SharonSorensonBirdLady, or email her at chshsoren@gmail.com.