Gray Catbirds

Melissa and I love watching Gray Catbirds at our feeders each summer.  They’re not the most colorful of birds, with a mostly gray body, black cap, and patch of rust-colored feathers at the base of the tail, but they’re energetic and social.  You can encourage catbirds to visit your feeders with their favorite foods: Bark Butter and Bark Butter Bits, mealworms, jelly, and sunflower chips.  They also love berries, so plant native shrubs to supplement your feeders.  Their favorite fruits include serviceberry, winterberry holly, and dogwood, and native viburnums like arrowwood.  In our yard, we’ve had a whole family of catbirds, most of them juveniles, visiting the elderberry bush in our front yard during the last few weeks.

Gray Catbirds have a useful skill that most other birds don’t share.  They are able to recognize the eggs of Brown-headed Cowbirds.  Cowbirds are parasites, laying their eggs in the nests of other birds.  The cowbird nestlings typically hatch earlier than the eggs of the host species, and the nestlings are larger and more aggressive than their “foster siblings.”  Catbirds solve the problem from the start by pushing the cowbird egg over the edge of the nest.

Unfortunately, we won’t get to enjoy catbirds for much longer this year.  They’ll soon migrate, flying south or east towards the coast.  Looking back over the last thirteen years of bird data from my yard, the average date for my last Gray Catbirds sighting is October 8 (their average return date in the spring is April 26).  Along the Atlantic Coast, you can find catbirds wintering as far north as Cape Cod.  Others move to warmer areas along the Gulf Coast, and some travel even farther, flying across the Gulf of Mexico to the Yucatan Peninsula and Central America.  Very small numbers of catbirds can be seen in Pennsylvania during the winter, but they’re so scarce that I usually only see a “winter catbird” once every five years or so.

Like most songbirds, the average lifespan of a catbird is between two and four years.  However, the oldest known catbird lived nearly 18 years.  It was banded, meaning researchers placed a metal ring on its leg with a unique identification number.  It was first captured and banded in New Jersey the year I was born.  It was last seen in Maryland a few months before I graduated high school.