A Hairy Woodpecker feeds on high-energy suet while fluffing its plumage out to keep a warm layer of air between its feathers and body (photos by Paul Konrad). A female Pine Grosbeak photographed during a winter cold snap has fluffed her feathers to create a layer of air that is warmed by their high body heat (about 104 degrees).

The weather has been frightful during the past week in most areas of the United States and Canada, and for birds searching for food in sub-freezing temperatures, plus colder wind chills, it makes you wonder how birds adapt to winter weather, which has become a serious matter of survival during the current mid-January cold snap. Over millennia, and year to year, birds have adapted to be able to survive, and they are assisted by birders like you who provide access to quality foods, and landscaping that serves as shelter.

How do birds survive inclement winter weather? Sometimes birds simply evacuate. Flying to a warmer area or an area with no snow cover and more abundant foods can be one response. This may be a short term, relatively short flight for some species; but it may be a continuation of migration for species that linger north of their usual winter range. For birds that remain, there are a number of ways birds adapt to the changing conditions of winter.

Birds have a natural way to insulate themselves from cold weather – they use their feathers. Most important, during cold weather, a bird will fluff their feathers away from their body to create a layer of air that is warmed by their high body heat. This provides a warm air layer between a birds’ body and the air outside their plumage. Birds have a body temperature of about 104 degrees, which varies a little from bird species to species, but overall it is obviously much warmer than humans (if our temperature was 104, we’d be sick with a high fever).

Birds’ down feathers also provide extra insulation to retain the warmth of their body when the temperature drops. Some birds even grow extra down feathers in the months leading up to winter so they are better prepared for cold snaps or continuous winter cold. Another way birds stay warmer is to stay out of the wind – avoid wind chill – and we often see a bird clinging to a tree on the opposite side from the wind, or even perching on the lee side of a feeder, or any other windbreak.

If they have enough quality food to eat, birds can break from their usual search for food, thereby reducing their activities during cold weather. At night, some birds roost in shelters like tree cavities, crevices in buildings, or in nest boxes. Some species of chickadees, kinglets, and bluebirds may roost in groups to conserve and share body heat, and woodpeckers regularly construct their own roosting cavity that they use for short-term or longer term periods.

While preening feathers is a regular maintenance behavior, wet feathers can prove disastrous in cold weather. By preening with natural oil produced in a gland near the top base of their tail, birds preen a lite film of oil onto their feathers to make them virtually waterproof. During wet weather, birds also tend to seek shelter in thick vegetation or a cavity or nest box.

Finding Winter Foods

With much less food available during winter months in cold weather regions, especially with the lack of insects during freezing temperatures, many birds adapt by changing their diet. Most birds search out higher energy foods such as suet and black oil sunflower seeds, where available. The additional energy boost from these quality foods allows birds to generate more body heat to keep warm. Some familiar backyard birds even store food – including nuthatches, chickadees, and jays – especially caching seeds for later use. But to be successful, these birds must rely on their memory to reclaim the seeds during a time of need. As an example, it has been documented that a Black-capped Chickadee can remember hundreds of locations where it stored seeds.

Some birds also search for food in flocks, sometimes in mixed-species flocks. This technique provides more eyes to search of food sources, and birds can learn from one another how to search for different foods. More birds looking for food also equates to more birds watching for danger, especially predators.

Helping Birds During Winter

Most birders are dedicated to providing a dependable feeding station stocked with a variety of quality foods, and fresh water. A feeding station can be as elaborate, or as decorative, or as simple as you wish, but it’s important to provide good quality foods that are eaten by the birds you see wintering in your area.

To start with, suet is a staple bird food due to its high fat content that provides much needed energy. Black oil sunflower seeds are the best high-calorie seeds to offer, shelled or unshelled (we prefer to provide unshelled seeds to avoid the mess of shells), and for smaller finches that will eat shelled sunflower seeds and sunflower chips, we also provide nyjer thistle seeds. By all means, avoid buying packages of mixed seeds that are typically sold at grocery stores; they tend to provide seeds with little food value mixed with cracked corn and other filler seed types to reduce the cost of the bag of “bird seeds.”

It’s important to keep your feeders stocked daily, just as you feed any pets on a daily basis. Birds need water too, so if you can provide a heated bird bath, you will be a center of attention for birds that need to drink and bathe regularly.

Of course, the landscaping in your yard can provide food and shelter for birds too. The most obvious foods are provided by fruiting trees, including crab apples, service berry, winter berry holly, bayberry, and others that yeild fruit or berries. Evergreen trees also provide seeds in their seasonally produced cones that many birds utilize, and they may provide the best natural shelter for a variety of wintering birds. Bushes, hedges, and tangles of deciduous trees provide shelter and foraging habitat too.

Providing shelter can also be a matter of adding a birdhouse for cavity-nesting birds or a specialized roosting box. Some wintering birds will use a vacant birdhouse to get out of the wind, but roost boxes are a relatively new product that provide an added level of winter shelter by retaining valuable warmth created by the birds. Better yet, there are now some convertible nest/roost boxes (see the Products section of this issue for more information) that seem like game changers for small cavity nesting birds like bluebirds, titmice, and chickadees.

Birds are amazing and resilient creatures that give us an exciting dose of nature on a daily basis. Enjoy the birds that winter in your neighborhood, and do what you can to benefit them during trying winter weather periods like we’ve experienced lately across expansive regions of the country. The above information was developed using an article provided by Perky-Pet and other articles as a basis to share more about how birds survive cold weather and how we help them survive Arctic weather fronts. To refer to the Perky-Pet article, see How Birds Survive in Winter Weather (perkypet.com)

Share your backyard birding experiences and photographs with The Birding Wire at editorstbw2@gmail.com