Autumn is not just a time when the summer birds depart; it is also when the winter birds arrive. In the first half of October I was still seeing straggling migrants or stubborn residents who had simply not yet flown south — or all the way south. Most warblers are gone now, but I still see a yellowthroat skulking around the meadow above my cabin, although he is nearly silent now.

Yellow-rumped warblers are the members of their tribe most likely to remain in the Northeast through the winter. While living on Martha’s Vineyard I saw several during a blustery Christmas Bird Count, and they are still present here at woodland/meadow edges. 

Up on Mount Kearsarge this past weekend, I encountered a hermit thrush. Like the yellowthroat, this usually vocal bird was silent, moving ghost-like through the understory, searching for a meal that was getting scarcer by the day. Now that we have had a couple of frosts, these insect-eating birds will make themselves scarce.

The winter birds are almost always seed-eaters, most of them finches of one stripe or another. The dark-eyed juncos — essentially gray and white sparrows — are possibly my favorite. To get to my backyard some don’t have to come very far. 

In the summer I hear them singing in the Langenau Forest, which is draped over the slopes of Philbrick Hill, 600 feet above us, but they won’t appear here until I put out my feeders in November. I have already been seeing them around town, their white outer tail feathers flashing as they fly up from the gravel roads, where they forage for weed seeds blown there from the scruffy roadsides.

White-throated sparrows may make a similarly short journey down from higher elevations to the more sheltered valleys, but in the past month we have also seen flocks of them that have surely come from farther north. They breed all the way to the limit of coniferous forest in Canada. 

They seem ravenous as they hop across our lawn, seeming to pounce and scratch back with both feet in that distinctive sparrow way. Last year none lingered at our feeders through the winter; they all kept going on their way to warmer climes.

Tree sparrows are called “winter chippies” for their resemblance to the chipping sparrow — they both have rufous caps and a line through the eye, and they are present only in the winter at this latitude. They breed in the taiga — the boreal coniferous forest — and into the southern reaches of the tundra. In the winter they prefer more open settings, so we do not have them at our feeders, but they are abundant a quarter mile away at a feeder of the public library, which looks out on a marsh dotted with occasional trees and shrubs.

Although we are at the southern edge of the range of both kinglets, I see only the golden-crowned in the summer and then only at higher elevations where there are abundant spruce and fir trees. The ruby-crowned is a delightful transient because it usually sings as it travels, although more enthusiastically in the spring. In the fall they pass through, slightly offset from the warblers, peaking a bit later. 

The ruby-crowned’s winter range does not overlap with their breeding range at all. In contrast, golden-crowned kinglets are more like juncos: they migrate, but not very far. In warmer months kinglets are insect-eaters, but in the winter they deign to supplement this diet with vegetable matter. 

I am still seeing golden-crowned kinglets around, but the ruby-crowns have long since passed through. The kinglets do not come to our feeders, however. I have to encounter them in the forest during a winter walk, where they will be combing trees top to bottom in search of cold-stunned arthropods.

Many raptors depart for the winter. I haven’t seen a broad-winged hawk for several weeks, but this week I did see a red-tailed hawk on top of Cross Hill, where I have never seen one before. Earlier in the week I also spotted a red-shouldered hawk hunting in a field at the corner of Baker and Kearsarge Valley roads in Sutton, again where I hadn’t seen one before. 

These birds move around in the winter, looking for a place with a steady supply of mice and squirrels. The real winter raptor though is the rough-legged hawk. This tundra species can be seen at airports, golf courses, seashore dune fields, and other open habitats in our region. But only in the winter.