Two good friends and fellow members of the Elizabethton Bird Club, Brookie and Jean Potter, achieved a personal birding milestone at the end of January.

Both Brookie and Jean managed to see 100 birds in the first month of 2024 in the five-county area. Brookie had already accomplished this feat many years ago, but Jean had never been able to do it — until now.

“We did it today on the last day of the month,” she shared in an email.

Brookie ended the month with 101 species of birds, and Jean reached 100.

Their final bird of the month was the red-breasted nuthatch. They had to put in some effort to find the species, finally traveling to Carver’s Gap on the state line between North Carolina and Tennessee on Roan Mountain.

“We kept waiting for this bird to come to our feeder, but when it didn’t come, we had to go to Carver’s Gap, which had snow, fog and a temperature of 29 degrees,” she said.

According to Jean, they located two of these little nuthatches close to the parking area.

“The things we do to find birds,” Jean remarked.

If they can find another 100 or more species of birds in the remaining 11 months of 2024, the couple will be eligible for the Howard P. Langridge Award. The Elizabethton Bird Club presents this award to any member who manages to see 200 or more species in a single year in the five-county area.

The award commemorates the contributions of the late Langridge to birding in the region. In 2000, Langridge broke the record for most species seen in a single year in Northeast Tennessee. The record was later broken again by Rick Knight.

In our region, the stubby red-breasted nuthatch is another member of a family that often finds its way to our yards. Smaller than the related white-breasted nuthatch and, as far as I can tell, complacent in the company of chickadees and titmice, the red-breasted nuthatch is always a welcome visitor.

This little feeder visitors has a telltale “yank yank” call that it produces when excited that sounds very much like a little tin horn. The red-breasted nuthatch, perhaps because it spends so much of the year in more remote areas, can also be amazingly tame when it pays a winter visit.

Both red-breasted and white-breasted nuthatches can be attracted to feeders by offering peanuts, sunflower seeds and suet. They are also cavity- nesting birds but are more reluctant about accepting a nesting box as a place to rear young. They will gladly accept an old woodpecker hole or other natural cavity in a tree.

The website All About Birds notes that red-breasted nuthatches are common, and their populations have increased throughout most of their range between 1966 and 2019, according to the North American Breeding Bird Survey.

The website also points out that Partners in Flight estimates a global breeding population of 20 million and rates the species a 6 out of 20 on the Continental Concern Score, indicating a species of low conservation concern.

While the red-breasted nuthatch is a small bird, some members of its family aren’t so petite. On the other end of the size scale is the appropriately named giant nuthatch, which reaches a length of almost 8 inches. The giant nuthatch ranges through China, Thailand and Burma and is bigger than a downy woodpecker, another of our more common visitors at backyard feeders in our region.

Worldwide, there are about 25 species of nuthatches, some of which have surprisingly descriptive names for birds that spend most of their lives creeping in obscurity along the trunks and branches of trees. Some of the more creative common names for these little birds include beautiful nuthatch, velvet-fronted nuthatch, sulphur-billed nuthatch, chestnut-bellied nuthatch, snowy-browed nuthatch and chestnut-vented nuthatch.

These birds are named “nuthatch” for the habit of some species to wedge a large seed in a crack and hack at it with their strong bills.

In some winters, red-breasted nuthatches can be quite common in the region. That’s not been the case this winter, as shown by the difficulty Brookie and Jean had in locating this bird.

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For those interested, there’s a great chance to get outdoors and look for red-breasted nuthatches and other birds. The annual Great Backyard Bird Count will be held Friday, Feb. 16, through Monday, Feb. 19.

It’s easy to take part in this global survey of bird populations all around the planet.

The first step is to choose a location for looking.

A favorite park, walking trail or your own backyard will work.

Next, actively watch for birds for 15 minutes or more, at least once over the four days from Feb. 16-19.

You will need to identify all the birds you see or hear within your planned time/location and use the best tool for sharing your bird sightings.

For a beginning bird admirer and those who are new to bird identification, try using the Merlin Bird ID app to pinpoint what birds you are seeing or hearing.

If you have participated in previous GBBCs before and want to record numbers of birds, try the eBird Mobile app or enter your bird list on the eBird website using a desktop/laptop computer.

If you already contribute to Merlin or eBird, continue what you are doing. All entries over the 4-day period count towards GBBC.

For more information on the GBBC, visit www.birdcount.org.

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To share a sighting, ask a question or make a comment, email me at ahoodedwarbler@aol.com.