Halloween is a fun holiday if you don’t count the macabre. I’ve always enjoyed this time of the year and have good memories of trick and treating with my neighborhood friend, Naomi. We ran around our neighborhood through dark and windy October nights, dressed in old 1940s dresses and hats we found in Mom’s attic.
We weren’t much for costumes but we were pretty good at hitting up as many homes as we could, gathering treats.
This Halloween, many years later, I am the recipient of a different kind of treat. My husband and I have been adopted by a pair of nuthatches that are very generous with their tweets.
One recent afternoon, Dick was strolling past the woodpile on his way to the garage when something landed on his shoulder. He was a bit startled when the “something” flew up and onto his visor cap.
It was a nuthatch.
What else could Dick do but give it a treat. He placed several peanuts on top of a cement block atop the woodpile. The rest is history.
We are now hand feeding a pair of nuthatches, and they’re so darn cute we don’t care that they’re using us. One bird was soon joined by a second and together they work us over good. Sometimes they perform an avian version of a Japanese Kamikaze Zero and dive at our faces, then gently land on our hands and grab a peanut.
Other times they tweet from a nearby branch, and we stretch out a peanut filled hand, palm up. The first time one landed on my hand I was enthralled to feel the tiniest of claws softly land, grasping one of my fingers.
These birds know a sucker when they see one, or I should say, two suckers. They quickly taught us how to hand feed them by giving a tweet when they saw us. This let us know they were hanging on the eaves or somewhere nearby and expected a snack. Of course, we obliged. We’ve learned to carry peanuts with us at all times and to hold out a hand with goodies.
One day, as I walked Magoo the pug on the South Shore Drive, I heard nuthatch chatter, so I reached into my jacket pocket for the peanuts I always carry and held out a peanut-filled hand. Sure enough, a tweet sounded in my ear as one of our nuthatches scooped up a peanut and flew off.
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