What's Happening on Peabody Street

(Listen to the radio version here.)

At this very moment, I have a hummingbird feeder on my home office window along with two small feeders—one filled with a seed mixture formulated for cardinals, the other with a concoction called “Bluebird Bugberry Blend.” Several songbirds and a Downy Woodpecker come to the two feeders, but my chickadees and nuthatches don’t limit themselves to them—they regularly sip water from the center moat of the hummingbird feeder, too.

I spend a lot of time chasing off starlings and, even worse, pigeons, who are much too big for the tiny feeders and end up spilling more than they eat. I love pigeons but they don’t need subsidies, and it’s illegal to feed them in Duluth.

If I clap and wave my arms at them from my desk, they fly off, but my hummingbirds, chickadees, nuthatches, and cardinals usually take that in stride—they sometimes even stick around when I rush up to the window waving madly. I don’t know how they came to the realization that they have favored status with me. Do they know that they’re the reason I fill the feeders in the first place?

My Blue Jays didn’t get that memo, at least not about those window feeders. Every morning I bring out a cup of sunflower seed, a handful of small suet balls, and a handful of unsalted peanuts in the shell, scatter them in my big backyard tray feeder, and make a particular whistle. The crows and jays fly in almost instantly, even with me still standing right there.

But when a jay comes to the window feeder, if I move a muscle, and it’s impossible not to at my treadmill desk—zoom—there it goes! One of my local adults has been coming close enough to the window to let me see its disheveled appearance, but if it comes to the feeder, it’s when I’m not in my office. (Parent Blue Jays hold off on molting until their babies don’t need many feedings anymore, so this time of year it’s easy to tell the young—all in perfect plumage—from the adults.)

The Blue Jays and crows pretty much finish everything before the pigeons show up. Before I had pigeons visiting so much, I used to keep that tray feeder filled with sunflower seeds whenever I had Blue Jays or other flocking birds, but with the pigeons it’s not worth it, and as a bonus, there isn’t anything left to attract bears, so maybe they’ll give us a break this year. We did have a bear in our yard last night, according to the big pile of scat he or she left, but my feeders were untouched and our fence wasn’t damaged, making this bear just as polite as the skunk who was nosing around under my feeders last month. When it started moving toward our patio, I opened the backdoor and told it, “Uh, uh. You must not come on the patio!” and the pretty little thing turned and walked away.

I’d had a pair of catbirds coming many times a day who also seemed to recognize their protected status at the window feeders. They spent a lot of time in my juneberries and dogwood, and I think were nesting in the back of my yard, but they disappeared during that extreme heat and horrible air quality last month, and I haven’t seen them since. I could count on seeing catbirds each and every day last summer, and until that terrible few days, they were following the same pattern this year, so I’m pretty sure the combination of record-breaking heat and dangerous levels of particulates in the air killed them. My neighbor has still been seeing one catbird in her yard, so there were at least some survivors.

My female cardinal also disappeared for a while, but I think she was just on eggs because she’s back again. The two fledglings that had been begging persistently from the male are still following him sometimes but seem to be getting their own food now, so if the female has produced a new batch of eggs, Dad and she will soon have more babies to feed.

With the heat, I took my hummingbird feeders in for a while. One or two hummingbirds kept visiting the two fuchsias in hanging baskets on my front porch, and I’d also occasionally see them at some early-blooming bee balm, but I wasn’t seeing much other hummingbird activity. Now, as always in August, suddenly they’re back in force, feeding at my bee balm, wild bergamot, those fuchsias, and my window feeder. I always put a bunch of my houseplants out on the patio for the summer, and this year hummingbirds are suddenly visiting my crown-of-thorns plant. There are no hummingbirds in Madagascar where the plant is native—there, it’s pollinated by insects and its thorns and toxic sap keep mammals and any birds that try to perch in it at bay. Hummingbirds don’t have to worry about that.

Flickers have been very regular in my yard this summer, apparently nesting in one of the big trees in back. There are plenty of ants in both my front and back yard, so I usually see them on the ground.

But for the past couple of days, I’ve been seeing a male and a female occasionally visiting my suet feeder. Up until last year, the flickers I’ve associated with feeders were the red-shafted subspecies of the West, not our good old yellow-shafteds. It’s fun watching a familiar, common bird develop new behaviors and routines.

I hadn’t seen a Pileated Woodpecker on Peabody Street in several weeks, right up until today. Both a male (not my banded male “BB”) and a female had been visiting virtually every day well in to June, and I was pretty sure they were nesting nearby. Sure enough, today the male brought his daughter!

Meanwhile, that male seemed to displace BB this past December, and I haven’t seen him once in 2026. He may well still be out there—Pileateds can be long-lived and they range pretty widely. BB was originally banded a mile from here at Hawk Ridge. I saw a female bearing a band once last year; she may have become BB’s mate and led him to her territory—female woodpeckers get to call all the shots.

I feel bereft without him—it was so joyful knowing and regularly seeing a recognizable individual of such an iconic species for so many years (2021 through 2025), and even more joyful because BB was so tolerant of me. But it’s wonderful to know that the neighborhood is still welcoming Pileated Woodpeckers. For all I know, this one could be BB’s son.

That’s the way it is in the natural world—so many comings and goings, rhythmic and predictable, arhythmic and unpredictable. When you pay attention to what’s happening out there, even in your own backyard, life really is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get, but it’s certain to be sweet.