Day 18.301: Return of RBNU

The Institute for Bird Populations assigns four letter codes to each bird species based on their English names. Our naturalist friend J jokes that he is fluent in only two languages, English and these bird codes. From him we learned first ROPI for rock pigeon and then various other codes for birds we see fairly regularly. These codes are fairly commonly used by North American birdwatchers - primarily for easy data-entry using eBird. As far as I know they are much less known and used (if at all) in other places.

Today marks the first day of our second weekend of counting birds for Project FeederWatch for this season and we've been very happy to see a lot of one (possibly more than one) red-breasted nuthatch (or RBNU) visiting our feeders through the daylight hours. We used to see them fairly regularly, but much less so recently. In fact, they didn't make it onto our FeederWatch counts at all in the 24-25 or 23-24 seasons.  

Red breasted nuthatch [a.k.a. RBNU or Sitta canadensis] (R) with black-capped chickadee (L) for a convenient size-comparison