• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

The Glen Park Association

Up-to-the-minute news from Glen Park

  • Home
  • Glen Park Association
    • About the Glen Park Association
    • Join the GPA
    • GPA Board Contacts
    • Bylaws
    • Neighborhood boundaries
    • Financials
    • GPA Meeting Minutes
  • News Stories
    • Glen Park News
    • Glen Park News archive
  • Greenway
    • About
    • Greenway Plan
  • GPA Grants Program
  • Crime & Safety
  • Contact
    • Contact
    • Volunteer Sign Ups
    • Event Submission
    • Author Submissions

A Nuthatch Family Makes A New Home

December 5, 2018 by Murray Schneider

Richard Craib raised his family on Turquoise Way, his backyard abutting the upper reaches of Glen Canyon. This summer he oversaw a family of white-breasted nuthatches at the house he built and has lived in since 1962.

Craib recently sat in his living room, which overlooks a mini-forest of pines, cypresses and redwoods. A barn owl box he’d fastened to a backyard pine stared back at him.

It’s now empty.

But a Douglas fir beam that runs along his inside ceiling and continues on the other side of his sitting room window wasn’t.

As Craib watched, a nuthatch exited a cavity it had burrowed in the exterior part of the dark-stained beam. It moved acrobatically, twisting its head, searching for an insect or meaty seed, then flew off, alighting on a pine branch.

“There was a hole in the wood,” Craib said, “but the nuthatch made it larger.”

While Craib studied the outside beam, a second nuthatch peeked from the hole. It stepped out, then decided sanctuary was more important than scenery. Its plumage was warm and blue-gray, its under-parts whitish.

“This has been going on for three weeks now,” Craib said.

Nuthatches, typically four inches long with a wingspan of nearly eight inches, range from British Columbia through the western United States and as far south as Mexico. They are songbirds that weigh, on average, well below an ounce. They commonly nest in dead conifer stubs, lining the bottoms of cavities with pinecone scales, plant duff and animal renderings.

Craib stood and walked onto his deck. Below, in the park, a dog walker trailed his unleashed pet up the slope, stepping beneath Craib’s vacant owl house. Soon he and his dog were lost to view, swallowed by deciduous tree limbs.

“The birds stopped excavating and started housekeeping,” Craib said. “The female may be laying eggs.”

Females lay from four to nine eggs, depositing them in tree cavities and doing most of the incubation, which lasts for approximately 16 days. Young nuthatches leave the nest about 22 days after experiencing daylight.

Their lifespan is on average 18 months, according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. The species is gregarious, nesting in pairs, and they typically roost communally, a hundred of them capable of huddling in sequestered crevices. Adults and young remain together, nesting at night for warmth and protection. This cooperative behavior is rare among birds.

“I think they may be building a condominium for friends,” Craib said of his resident birds.

Clamorous stuttering—bit, bit, bit—echoed throughout his living room. “It begins about 6 o’clock each morning,” he said about the chorus, “and ends at dusk.”

Hyperactive in its behavior, the nuthatch’s incessant and staccato vocalization is a consequence of its culinary appetite.

The bird gets its common name, according to Andy McCormick, in an article on the pygmy nuthatch in the Eastside Audubon newsletter, from jamming large nuts and acorns into long-needled ponderosa pine forest habitat. After wedging large nuts and acorns into tree bark, they peck and whack them with sharp bills, “hatching” out the seed from the inside.

This makes a racket, the nuthatch version of perennial city street construction jackhammers.

“Nuthatches are singular,” Craib said of his winged visitors, “in that they walk down a tree.”

With such patented gymnastics, nuthatches forage headfirst down tree trunks, searching for invertebrates and twigs to feather their arboreal dugouts.

Nuthatch existence is threatened not just by cold and predation; the high-strung birds “are endangered in the wild by logging, forest fire and fire suppression,” McCormick wrote.

Craib is the former president of Friends of Glen Canyon Park, and helped establish the Little Red Hen Community Garden adjacent to the Police Academy. Living next to Glen Canyon, he is familiar with noisy critters.

“I’ve shared my backyard with raccoons, possums and skunks,” he said. “I’ve had beehives back there, 17 mallards that would fly around and land in my kids’ wading pool, even 25 laying Leghorn chickens.”

“In 1983, I donated the last of the chickens to the (Randall) Museum after raccoons made a meal of them.”

The nuthatches were muffled only by the length of the Douglas fir beam running from the living room out to a hummock of shrubs and trees.

Ha, ha, ha! the aerial homesteaders’ serenade began each morning.

Like clockwork.

Then, having enjoyed their visit to the edge of Glen Canyon, the nuthatches moved on, restoring a modicum of serenity.

This article was previously published in the Fall 2018 print edition of the Glen Park News.

Filed Under: Glen Canyon Park, Glen Park History, Wildlife

Primary Sidebar

IMPORTANT UPCOMING DATES

Arlington Path Beautification
Saturday, July 19, 10 a.m. to noon
Meet at 300 Mateo (x Arlington) for an exciting day of weeding, watering, seed collecting.
Tools, gloves and good company provided.


2025 Glen Park Night Market poster


 


Monthly cleanup on the Greenway
First Saturday of the Month (usually)
Click here to learn more


Friends of Glen Canyon’s
Glen Canyon Habitat Restoration
Every third Saturday 9:30 a.m to noon
Sign up here

Subscribe to this Newsletter

Sign Up for Glen Park Association News Updates:

* indicates required

Check It Out at the Glen Park Library

Click the above button or here to see all upcoming Glen Park Branch Library events. Subscribe to the Glen Park Library monthly newsletter to get events highlights in your inbox.

Glen Park Rec Center

Glen Canyon Park sign
Click the above button or here to see
the latest Glen Park Rec Center schedule.



Saturdays 3-4:45 p.m.
Questions? Call 415-239-4007


 

Renew Your Glen Park Association Membership for 2025

Join the Glen Park Association and help promote our community’s interests. Together, we can secure improvement funds, publicize neighborhood concerns and strive to speak as one voice on neighborhood and city issues.

Membership in the Glen Park Association is only $10 annually and can be purchased online.

Glen Park Association Advertising Sponsors

JE_Digital Small Space Ad
Diamond Heights Digital Ad
GPA Ad- Perez Construction ad 6.27.22 v Glen Park
moroco
Center for Creative Exploration - adult
JE_Digital Small Space Ad
Diamond Heights Digital Ad
GPA Ad- Perez Construction ad 6.27.22 v Glen Park
moroco
Center for Creative Exploration - adult
previous arrow
next arrow
Shadow

Current Weather & Air Quality

Glen Park featured on…

FacebookSF ChronInstagramTwitter

Join the Glen Park Association on Facebook

Comments Box SVG iconsUsed for the like, share, comment, and reaction icons
Glen Park Association is at Glen Park Greenway.
2 days ago
Glen Park Association

More people are discovering our Glen Park Greenway to Glen Canyon Park!

#glenparkgreenway #glenparksf #sanfrancisco #takeawalk #walk #hike #urban #urbanexplorer #crosstowntrail
... See MoreSee Less

More people are discovering our Glen Park Greenway to Glen Canyon Park!

#glenparkgreenway #glenparksf #sanfrancisco #takeawalk  #walk #hike #urban #urbanexplorer #crosstowntrail
View on Facebook
· Share
Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Linked In Share by Email
View Comments
  • likes 6
  • Shares: 0
  • Comments: 0

0 CommentsComment on Facebook

Glen Park Association is at Glen Park Greenway.
6 days ago
Glen Park Association

Saturday’s Glen Park Greenway Work Party is Cancelled.

“I’m very sorry to say that
we have cancelled our Work Party for this Saturday July 12, along with all organized volunteer activity on the Greenway until further notice.
As you may have read in the news, our fiscal sponsor, San Francisco Parks Alliance (SFPA), has shut itself down. Just as SFPA has shut itself down, the Greenway, as an organized part of SFPA, has also been “shut down.” We are busy looking for a suitable alternative fiscal sponsor that is willing to replace SFPA. That search is going well but it is a slow process. We had hoped to find temporary ways to enable the Greenway project to function responsibly as a community activity without a fiscal sponsor. Sadly, despite our best efforts and the help of many others in Glen Park, we have failed. That is why we must cancel our Saturday Work Party and discontinue future work parties and other organized volunteer activity on the Greenway (like weeding and watering) until further notice. We recognize that the Greenway is public open space and that the organizers of the Greenway project have no control over the activities of you or of anyone else on the Greenway. However, if you do venture onto the Greenway to satisfy your urge for outdoor recreation, please be aware that your activity is not in any way organized or sanctioned by the organizers of the Glen Park Greenway project. I’m well aware of the efforts that many of the
Greenway’s supporters are making to get the Greenway organized with a new fiscal sponsor and I’m confident that this will be arranged within weeks or perhaps a few months.
However long it takes, I will contact you with news of our progress.
Many thanks for all that you do for the Greenway.”

Nicholas Dewar, volunteer Project Director

#glenparkgreenway #glenparksf #sanfrancisco @rafaelmandelmand8 @danielluriesf @crosstowntrail
#crosstowntrail #sfparksalliance #publicspace #nature
... See MoreSee Less

Play
View on Facebook
· Share
Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Linked In Share by Email
View Comments
  • likes love sad 8
  • Shares: 0
  • Comments: 1

1 CommentComment on Facebook

Wonder what’s stopping just organizing it separate from that non-profit. It seems like the volunteers largely come from Glen Park.

Blog Roll

Coyote Yipps
Friends of Upper Noe Recreation Center
Glen Park Neighborhoods History Project
Open SF History
Sunnyside Conservatory
Sunnyside History
Sunnyside Neighborhood Association
Tramps of San Francisco
Upper Noe Neighbors

Copyright © 2025 · Metro Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in