Nuthatches will get their own nesting boxes in Georgia

Range in Georgia: Common resident in most of the state except Blue Ridge mountains.

Voice: High-pitched, squeaky, wheezy two-syllable sound, tyah-dah or chee-da, strikingly like a toy rubber duck.

Diet: Wide variety of insect prey during warmer months, including bark-dwelling cockroaches, spiders, beetle larvae, and insect egg cases; mainly eats pine seeds from cones during colder months.

Nesting: Pair excavates cavity in dead pine tree; places a bed of soft materials, including bark shreds, grasses, forbs, wood chips, hair, feathers, pine seed wings, and cocoon fibers, inside cavity; nests generally 2-10 feet above the ground, the lowest of any North American cavity nester; incubates 4-7 creamy white eggs with purple red markings for 13-15 days.

A few decades ago, Eastern bluebird populations were plummeting at alarming rates mostly because of habitat loss and competition from non-native birds for nesting sites.

But in a widespread effort to save the bird, bird lovers began putting up hundreds of thousands of bluebird nest boxes. As a result, the bluebird has made a spectacular comeback.

Now, bird experts say a similar effort is needed to rescue another declining species, the brown-headed nuthatch, whose squeaky voice is commonly heard in pine forests across Georgia.

Like the bluebird, the tiny brown-headed nuthatch is a cavity-nester. The nuthatch, though, is a pine specialist that lives in mature forests. It excavates nests in dead standing trees or utilizes abandoned woodpecker cavities.

Such habitat, however, has been rapidly declining due to urbanization, logging and agriculture. What’s more, a recent Audubon Climate Report says that global warming will cause even more drastic losses of nuthatch habitat.

That does not bode well for the little bird, whose numbers have declined by 45 percent overall since 1966.

The Georgia Audubon Council, made up of the state’s Audubon chapters, wants to reverse that trend, similar to the way bluebirds were rescued — by erecting nest boxes specifically designed for brown-headed nuthatches.

“We need to take action now,” said Nikki Belmonte, executive director of the Atlanta Audubon Society.

The council’s initial goal in 2015 is to have 90 nuthatch boxes installed across Georgia by October. They will be made by Mableton craftsman George Burkett, who has built scores of bluebird boxes. He said the smaller size of the entrance hole in a nuthatch box is the main difference between it and a bluebird box.

Eventually, the Audubon folks hope to have thousands of nuthatch boxes in Georgia.

IN THE SKY: The Quadrantid meteor shower, visible this weekend and most of next week, will reach a peak of about 80 meteors per hour on Sunday night. Look to the north after dark until dawn, said David Dundee, Tellus Science Museum astronomer.

The moon will be full on Sunday — the “Cold Moon,” as the Cherokee peoples called January’s full moon. Mercury is very low in the west at dusk. Venus is low in the west just after dark. Mars sets in the west a few hours after sunset. Jupiter rises out of the east around 8 p.m. and will appear near the moon on Wednesday. Saturn rises out of the east around 3 a.m.