What's there for a bird to eat, other than berries?

Getting through the winter here means finding food in harsh times with limited sources of survival. The species photographed recently at Halibut Point have adapted to dietary strategies mostly other than berries. The descriptions of their eating patterns come from the All About Birds website of Cornell University's Ornithology Lab.

White-breasted Nuthatch on a tree trunk

White-breasted Nuthatches eat mainly insects.... They probe into bark crevices or chip away at wood to find food. When they find large nuts and seeds, they jam them into the bark and hammer them open. White-breasted Nuthatches often store seeds and insects one at a time, and somewhat haphazardly, under loose bark on their territory. They typically hide the food by covering it with a piece of bark, lichen, moss, or snow.

American Tree Sparrow gleaning a field

Winter is the time to go looking for American Tree Sparrows. Despite their name, you'll probably find them foraging on the ground rather than feeding in trees....From fall through spring, they're almost exclusively vegetarian, eating grass, sedge, ragweed, knotweed, goldenrod, and other seeds, as well as occasional berries, catkins, insects, insect eggs, and larvae. In settled areas, they happily eat small seeds from feeders—including millet scattered on the ground.

Common Redpoll consuming seeds from birch catkins

Common Redpolls [an uncommon sight at Halibut Point] are active foragers that travel in busy flocks. Look for them feeding on catkins in birch trees or visiting feeders in winter. These small finches of the arctic tundra and boreal forest migrate erratically. Winter diet is largely birch and alder seeds.

Greater Scaup in the Halibut Point quarry

Greater Scaup eat aquatic invertebrates such as mollusks, insects, and crustaceans at the bottom of lakes and bays as well as aquatic plants, insects, and seeds.

Scaup diving

To capture aquatic invertebrates in soft muddy substrates, scaup stick their bill into the mud and quickly open and close it while swimming forward. They tend to forage in waters less than 7 feet deep, but can forage and dive up to 23 feet in deeper water.

Purple Sandpipers foraging at the shoreline

Purple Sandpipers breed on arctic tundra; they spend winters on North Atlantic shores, farther north than any other shorebird. Purple Sandpipers forage most heavily during falling tides....eating creatures unfamiliar to most people such as mussels, periwinkles, sea snails, worms, and small crabs and other crustaceans. —and indeed many of their prey items have only scientific names. They stand or walk slowly on rocks, searching for prey visually or simply inserting the bill into algae or wrack to detect prey by touch or taste. Often, they probe between barnacles or mussels for small prey items.

Peregrine Falcon perched on a promontory

Powerful and fast-flying, the Peregrine Falcon hunts medium-sized birds, dropping down on them from high above in a spectacular stoop. Peregrine Falcons eat mostly birds, of an enormous variety—450 North American species have been documented as prey, and the number worldwide may be as many as 2,000 species. They have been observed killing birds as large as a Sandhill Crane, as small as a hummingbird, and as elusive as a White-throated Swift. Typical prey include shorebirds, ptarmigan, ducks, grebes, gulls, storm-petrels, pigeons, and songbirds including jays, thrushes, longspurs, buntings, larks, waxwings, and starlings.