Even though the weather has been on the balmy side the birds have been working over the feeders like it was blustery midwinter.

Earlier in the fall I only had to tend them once a week or so but lately it has become an every other day chore. The customers have been a rather mundane lot – mostly downy and red-headed woodpeckers, chickadees, titmice, nuthatches and a continuous, seething mass of goldfinches.  That’s going to change, though. This morning I noticed some new customers just now arriving from up north, juncos. Soon this place will be inundated with them. That ought to make the sharp-shinned hawks happy for they’ve surely grown sick of their monotonous goldfinch diet by now. Even if they do taste just like chicken one can only eat so much chicken.

Juncos are one of the most common of all our birds but despite their commonality they have forever driven scientists nuts. Scientific types were born to neatly classify things in precise order with no “T” left uncrossed, “I” undotted or feather unturned. Juncos defy this orderliness.  When I was a knowledge hungry kid the voluminous book, “Birds of America,” published in 1917, was my bird Bible (and still is). It uses the term slate-colored junco for the primary species. It then goes on to list over twenty more species of juncos found in North America, most residing in the western states. However, modern field guides had me confused by calling juncos dark-eyed juncos, not slate-colored. Time to figure out what’s going on here.

Much of the problem in classifying juncos comes from their frequent interbreeding and wide color variation. In 1973 the American Ornithologists Union decided to simplify all the junco gobble-de-gook and lumped a bunch of presumed different species together, including the slate-colored junco, and label them dark-eyed juncos. Then they went on to list three to five other variations (depending on who’s talking). At the moment it appears there are two primary species of juncos, dark-eyed juncos, that is. The one most common throughout the eastern U.S. is my old slate-colored junco. The west’s junco representative is the more brown colored Oregon junco, though the Oregon junco routinely appears throughout the eastern states, too.

The rest of the subspecies are pretty much localized in small areas so we’ll let those locals worry about them. The systematics still aren’t fully untangled and junco variations continue to be shuffled around from group to group.

Anyhow, here in southern Michigan juncos form a living carpet on the ground under the bird feeders all winter long.  Then in the spring they seem to just gradually melt away like the snow. They head for their breeding grounds farther north.  Some may only go as far as northern Michigan but most continue on, spreading out all across the boreal forests of Canada and Alaska. Some even seek the solitude of the Arctic. Then in late fall the juncos return to remind us the snows of winter aren’t far off. They return to the same place each year in flocks which have a fixed membership and hierarchy. The routine squabbles at the feeders aren’t over food but rather dominance.

Because juncos come and go with the snow they once carried the name of snowbird, which sticks with many to this day. The more seasoned of us surely remember Ann Murray’s hit song, “Snowbird” which still plays on the oldies stations today. I doubt it would have topped the charts if she’d tried to wax poetic about dark-eyed juncos.
Snowbird was their accepted common name until the 1830’s when scientists decided that was far too romantic for official business and began using the word junco, after the Latin word juncus, meaning seed. That, too, is fitting because weed seeds make up the bulk of their diet, occasionally served on a bed of juicy caterpillar.

Carpe diem.

Larry Lyons writes a weekly outdoor column for Leader Publications. He can be reached at larrylyons@verizon.net