How to Attract Red-Breasted Nuthatches: The Coniferous-Garden Bird

Field notes from under the spruce, irruption winter, January.

The short version: Red-breasted Nuthatches need conifers. If your garden has spruce, pine, hemlock or fir within sight of the feeder, you can attract them with black-oil sunflower seed, sunflower hearts, suet, or peanut butter. They are upside-down feeders, cache seeds in bark crevices, and rim their nest hole with pine pitch. In irruption years they appear thousands of miles south of their normal range - keep the feeder full and you’ll get one.

What separates them from White-breasted Nuthatches

If you’ve already got White-breasted Nuthatches at your feeder, Red-breasted are the smaller, more confiding cousin with a different habitat preference. The split is sharp:

• White-breasted prefers mature deciduous trees - oak, maple, beech. Cleaner white face, bigger bird (about 20 g), louder yank-yank call.
• Red-breasted is a conifer specialist. Black eye-stripe under a white brow, rust-coloured underparts, smaller (about 10 g), with a higher, nasal yenk-yenk call that sounds like a tiny tin trumpet.

A garden with conifers gets both species through winter; a garden without conifers usually only gets White-breasted. If you want Red-breasted reliably and you don’t have a spruce or pine within 200 metres, plant one. It’s the single biggest predictor of their visit.

What they eat at a feeder

Red-breasted Nuthatches are insectivores in summer (gleaning small arthropods from bark) and seed-eaters in winter. At a feeder they take:

• Black-oil sunflower seed - their everyday favourite. They’ll grab one, fly to a perch, jam it into a bark crevice, and hammer it open with the bill. Watching them work is a small daily joy.
• Sunflower hearts - taken eagerly, no shell-cracking work needed.
• Suet or peanut butter - winter calorie supplement. They cling vertically to a suet log without trouble.
• Peanut pieces - taken from feeders sized for small birds.
• Pine and spruce seeds - the wild food. If you don’t deadhead conifer cones, the birds will work them in late winter.

What they don’t take much of: nyjer (goldfinch food), millet (sparrow food), corn (filler).

The two-feeder setup that works

The same setup we recommend for chickadees works for Red-breasted Nuthatches, with one tweak: put one of the feeders closer to a conifer.

1. Tube feeder with sunflower hearts within 4-6 metres of a spruce or pine.
2. Suet log or vertical suet cage with peanut butter mix on the trunk of a conifer (or hanging from a low branch).

Nuthatches feed in short hops the way chickadees do - in and out of cover, one seed at a time. A feeder with no cover within reach gets less traffic.

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Linked products are ones we actually use.

The caching behaviour

Watch a Red-breasted Nuthatch at a feeder for ten minutes and you’ll see something most other songbirds don’t do - it will take a seed, fly to a tree, wedge it into a bark crevice, and fly back for another. It isn’t eating most of them. It’s caching. The bird builds up a network of hidden food stores across its territory, all winter, and remembers where they are.

Banded studies show Red-breasted Nuthatches recover roughly 80 percent of their caches. Their spatial memory is unusual, and the hippocampus enlarges in autumn to handle it.

What this means for you: if your nuthatches seem to be working the feeder constantly but the seed level is dropping slower than you’d expect, it’s because they’re spreading the seed across your trees, not eating it. The seed isn’t wasted - the bird will eat it later, or another bird will find it.

The nest box, with a strange caveat

Red-breasted Nuthatches will use a nest box but they have one famously odd habit: they smear conifer pitch around the entry hole. The pitch is sticky and probably deters predators or competing birds from entering. Sometimes they get stuck in their own pitch and die, which is the kind of evolutionary cost-benefit problem you don’t expect from a small bird.

If you put up a box, the specs are:

• Entry hole: 1-1/4 inches. Just larger than for a chickadee.
• Floor: 4×4 inches.
• Depth: 8-10 inches from hole to floor.
• Mounted: 6-15 ft up, ideally on a conifer trunk.
• Filled with wood shavings to a depth of 1-2 inches.

Expect to find pitch around the hole if a Red-breasted pair claims the box. Don’t try to clean it off - they need it.

Irruption years

Some winters, when the seed crop fails across the northern boreal forest, Red-breasted Nuthatches “irrupt” south in massive numbers. In a strong irruption year you’ll see them in places they don’t normally appear - the southern US, the British Isles (very rare but documented), or far below their breeding range.

Birding listservs flag the irruption by October. If you hear an irruption is on, fill the feeder with sunflower hearts and a suet block immediately - you may get a visitor you’d otherwise never see.

What else they bring

A garden that pulls Red-breasted Nuthatches usually has the rest of the small-songbird guild: chickadees, kinglets, the occasional brown creeper, downy woodpeckers, sometimes pine siskins. The full feeder-station setup for the lot is in how to attract common backyard birds; the chickadee-specific routine is in how to attract Black-capped Chickadees.

For the calorie supplement that ties the whole winter feeding operation together, see feeding birds peanut butter; for the full seed inventory, what to put in a bird feeder.

The bottom line

A spruce or pine within sight of the feeder, sunflower hearts on a tube, suet on a vertical log, and patience. By the second winter you’ll have a resident pair, and on the cold mornings you’ll watch them work upside-down through the spruce limbs - the small bird that doesn’t read the gravity rulebook.