Sitta carolinensis
Order Passeriformes
Family Sittidae
Subfamily Sittinae
Other names: White-bellied Nuthatch
♂ Adult male.— Upper parts grayish-blue, except the crown and front part of back, which is black; under parts white; feathers under the tail reddish-brown; tail short and square, all but the central pair of tail-feathers black, the outer ones with large white spots.
♀ Adult female.— Similar to the male, but the black of head and back replaced by dark grayish-blue.
Nest, in a hole in a tree.
Eggs, white, thickly spotted with brownish or lavender.
The White-bellied Nuthatch is a permanent resident of southern and central New England and the lower Hudson Valley, and a summer resident throughout New England and New York, but it is a local bird, and very rare in summer in many places. It spends almost its entire time on the trunks and large limbs of trees, where it hunts in a characteristic manner, sometimes peering over the sides, like a Black and White Warbler, often walking entirely around the limb, and not infrequently walking head downward on the trunk and observing an intruder with outstretched head. Unlike its relative, it rarely visits conifers, keeping chiefly to deciduous trees.
Attention is often drawn to the White-bellied Nuthatch by its nasal quank; the pitch of this call-note is very close to B-flat, though it varies to B, and it is always lower and heavier than the similar call-note of the Red-bellied Nuthatch. Its song, which it begins to utter early in March, resembles the syllables tõo-too-tão, quickly repeated. When singing, the Nuthatch generally perches on some small twig. The male brings food to the female while she is sitting.
A Nuthatch may be identified by its long, straight, slender bill, by its manner of clinging to the trunks or large limbs of trees, and by its grayish-blue black. The White-bellied Nuthatch may be distinguished from the [Red-breasted Nuthatch] by its greater size, by its pure white under parts (reddish only under the tail), and most surely by the absence of a black line through the eye; the white of the fore-neck extends up a little behind the ear.
Hoffmann – A Guide to the Birds of New England and Eastern New York (1904)