Bird of the Month: Bewick's Wren

If you encounter a noisy, hyperactive little bird with bold white eyebrows flicking its long tail as it hops nimbly from branch to branch, you may have spotted a Bewick's Wren (pronounced "buick's", like the car).
The Bewick's Wren is a medium-sized bird with a slender body and a strikingly long tail often held upright. Its slender bill is slightly down curved. The bird is brown and gray with a long white stripe over each eye. The back and wings are plain brown, underparts are gray-white and the tail is barred with black and tipped with white spots. The male and female look the same.
The Bewick's Wren is a master vocalist and can belt out a string of short whistles, warbles, burrs and trills or scold visitors with raspy calls.
As it skulks through tangles of branches and leaves looking for insects, the wren cocks its long tail up over its back often flicking it from side to side or fanning it.
The Bewick's Wren favors dry brush areas, chaparral, scrub thickets in open country and open woodlands near rivers and streams but they are equally at home in gardens, residential areas, cities and suburbs.
Although the Bewick's Wren primarily eats insects, it will come to suet, shelled peanuts and shelled sunflower seed.
The Bewick's Wren builds its nest in a cavity or on a ledge within 30 feet of the ground. The nest is cup-shaped and made with grasses, rootlets, leaves, moss or other plant materials. Some contain spider egg cases. The inside may be lined with feathers, wool, hair or plant down with a final inner lining of snakeskin. The male initiates the nest building and then the female helps out. The female will lay 3 - 8 eggs which will hatch in 14 - 16 days. The babies will fledge in 14 - 16 days.
Other cool facts about the Bewick's Wren:
* The species is named after British engraver Thomas Bewick who was a friend of pioneering bird artist John James Audubon.
* A young male Bewick's Wren learns to sing from neighboring adult males while growing up in his parents' territory. The songs he develops differ from his father's, with a note changed here, a syllable there. The melodious signature he acquires between the ages of about 30 and 60 days will be his for life.
* Courting Bewick's Wrens normally form monogamous pairs and the male and female often forage together.
* At the sound of approaching humans, a female Bewick's Wren incubating eggs usually flushes quietly from her nest cavity but remains nearby and scolds. Some females, however, sit tightly on their eggs even when disturbed.
* The Bewick's Wren population in the eastern United States has greatly declined mainly due to the expansion in range of the House Wren. The House Wren is suspect in the decline because they will frequently remove eggs from nests in cavities.
* The oldest recorded Bewick's Wren was at least 8 years old when it was recaptured and rereleased during banding operations in California.
* In his 1889 Ornithology of Illinois, Robert Ridgway attested that "No bird more deserves the protection of man than Bewick's Wren. He does not need man's encouragement, for he comes of his own accord and installs himself as a member of the community, wherever it suits his taste. He is found about the cowshed and barn along with the Pewee and Barn Swallow; he investigates the pig-sty; then explores the garden fence, and finally mounts to the roof and pours forth one of the sweetest songs that ever was heard."