BACKYARD SECRET – WHITE-BREASTED NUTHATCHES MAY PREFER HULLED SUNFLOWER SEEDS
backyardwildlifeconnection by Terry W.Johnson
It is always a treat to see white-breasted nuthatches at our feeders. If you are like me, you wish that they would our feeders more often. Here is one way that you may be able to entice these handsome birds to your feeders.
As we all know, white-breasted nuthatches eat sunflower seeds. Typically, the birds pluck individual sunflower seeds from our feeders and fly away to another location where they either crack them open or stash them for a later meal.
In one-study, researchers found white-breasted nuthatches, cached hulled sunflower seeds 25 percent more often than seeds that were unshelled. The researcher theorized this was due to the fact it takes a nuthatch about half the time to tote and cache hulled sunflower sees as it does unhulled seeds.
The study did not mention that the birds’ preference for hulled sunflower seeds increased the number of feeder visits made by the birds.
With that in mind, it would be easy to set up your own study to see if there is any correlation between the numbers of visits the birds make to feeders stocked with hulled sunflowers seeds versus those feeders containing unshelled sunflower seeds.
If you do conduct such a study, let me know what you learn.
