Only in winter: A world of bird activity just outside your window

Just past dawn, I arouse, stumble into the kitchen, start the coffee and then think of birds. It’s four degrees out there, steel gray curtain of sky just beginning to turn rosy pink. How are they doing? Who’s gotten up early? I walk to a window, peel back heavy curtains and look.

I’ve learned not to peel back those curtains too fast. If I do, feeder birds will explode off their perches. Sudden movements are not to their liking.

So I ease curtain one slowly back and see cardinals. They are working to stoke up their calorie count for the day. One male now rests on the perch birds alight on when approaching a hopper filled with sunflower seeds. Below him, three females plop down deep in snow. There they glean bits of cracked corn I scattered about late last evening.

I move to another room, repeating the peel-back routine. Out this window, a female pileated woodpecker hammers a suet cake in a cage tacked to the side of a maple. Even her super-sized chisel bill has to work hard. Suet may be beef fat, but at four degrees just about everything turns rigid as stone.

She wields her jack-hammer, dislodging a large chunk of suet. Several bits fall to the ground, where a brown creeper waits with its curved bill to vacuum the spoils.

My feeders will pop as the day slowly warms. I’ll see chickadees and titmice perched on tree branches, tiny feet clutching seeds their sharp bills hammer briskly to open.

More: Don't let the cold keep you stuck indoors. How to make the most of the winter season

I’ll watch bully-boy jays make grandstanding arrivals, wings flapping madly, jay calls screeching loudly. Small birds will scatter, knowing in their hearts, it is all much ado about nothing.

One curtain awaits as the sky slowly brightens and dark roast aromas prevail in a cold winter kitchen. Peeled back, it reveals dark-eyed juncos in a Christmas tree forest. From my woods, I have cut several four-foot-tall spruces, then stood them up next to each other in a grassy patch by the garage. Every evening I sprinkle cracked corn through the branches. Some corn sticks on them, some falls to the ground which the spruces have kept clear of snow.

Now, as I gaze at my Charlie Brown forest, I see junco forms scratching for food under sheltering boughs.

So another deep winter day slowly unfolds. Through its too-short duration, I’ll gaze dozens of times at the feeders. Ten juncos today. That’s a high for the season. Sometimes I keep none through the winter. Three male and two female cardinals have shown up out of nowhere. My kingdom to know where they came from. Someplace farther north? A feeder in Watertown closed down when people providing it seed couldn’t reach it through three feet of snow?

Their loss is my gain. I get bright macho reds, plus lady-shade olives to help me ride high through the winter.

This article originally appeared on Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin: Only in winter: A world of bird activity just outside your window