Here they come!

There we were, eating a late breakfast because we'd slept in (something I rarely did before I hit 85) and a tiny bushtit popped up on our suet feeder just a few feet from our kitchen window.

"Here they come..." Sue whispered, like the birds outside could hear her.

Then another tiny, long-tailed, blueish little chickadee-like bird flitted onto the feeder, and before we knew it there were 15 of the little guys all feeding hungrily on the suet cake.

I'll tell you, you may be having a down-in-the-dumps start on your day, but if you have a suet feeder and 15 little feathery folk suddenly appear right before your nose, all twittering to each other (in the natural sense, not electronically), you gotta have a change of heart that will make your day brighter.

Bushtits belong to that small group of birds known as "gleaners." That is, they spend the entire day - from sunup to sundown - "gleaning" ("scrounging" if you prefer) trees in search of insects, spiders and anything else that moves and is good to eat. There may be several flocks of up to 25 in a group scratching and poking beneath the bark, snatching up tree-eating beetle larvae and adults, and that makes them one of the most beneficial birds in the forest.

If there happened to be a large bark beetle hatch, for example, bushtits and the other gleaners - such as chickadees, and nuthatches - will be there to feast on them. That's just one reason it's wise to leave "Wildlife Trees" in the forest. In a wood-cutting area, it's always best if a wood-cutter spends some time looking over a dead tree for signs of woodpeckers chipping away and leaving it if it has any cavities. Chickadees and nuthatches use them for nesting, but bushtits build a huge communal sock in the branches of living trees.

This is a typical bushtit nursery, a mass of moss, lichens and other vegetation sewn together with grasses and spider webs, large enough for two or three families. Bushtits get along so well together - constantly talking about whatever bushtits like to gossip about - two or three families also raise their little ones in that comfy sock of moss and stuff.

As the moms and dads are out scrounging for tiny arthropods to feed their ever-starving babies, one auntie is usually left to babysit the hungry youngsters, who are often squeaking and hissing for their parents to hurry home from the supermarket with the goodies.

Sometimes, all that racket will attract a feathered or furred predator. As soon as auntie hears - or somehow senses - the presence of a stranger, she says the bushtit equivalent of "Shut up!" and a death-like silence settles inside the sock. It will remain that way until one of the parents drops through the opening with a beak-full of goodies, then bedlam breaks out again.

Gleaners cannot get long without suitable habitat. If a forest ecosystem is overworked or neglected, harvested too heavily, left to burn too many times, snags cut for firewood, thinned too much; irreplaceable damages are done to habitat, and eventually we pay the price when the forest goes out of balance.