“After a big snow, the juncos scratch at the drift where the tray used to be and come up with nothing.” — A retired Vermont roofer, 77, built a feeder with its own little roof. His final batch is now on sale at a special price.

Out by the woodpile behind Merritt Coombs’s barn in Peacham, Vermont, there is a cedar stake painted with black stripes, one every inch. He put it in the ground in 1971, the year he started roofing, because a roofer in the Northeast Kingdom lives and dies by snow load. After every storm he reads the stake and writes the number in a spiral notebook that hangs on a nail inside the barn door. Date, inches, and which customers’ roofs to go check.

Since 2017 the notebook has had a second column, in his wife Lorraine’s handwriting: which birds turned up at the dish the morning after. The biggest storm last winter put nineteen inches on the stake. Next to it Lorraine wrote: juncos 11, tree sparrows 4, cardinals 2, chickadees “lots.” Across the road, the neighbors’ open tray was a white mound until noon.

That difference matters more than it used to. Since 1970, North America has lost nearly three billion breeding birds, roughly one in four. The dark-eyed junco, the slate-gray bird New Englanders call the snowbird because it shows up with the first flakes, has lost more than a hundred and sixty million on its own. It is also one of the most widely reported birds in Cornell’s Project FeederWatch, the winter survey that tallies birds at backyard feeders across the continent. In other words, it is a feeder bird, and how we feed it matters.

For a junco, the worst stretch of winter usually isn’t the coldest night. It is the hours after a heavy snowfall, when every bit of food it knows about is buried.

Where the Seed Goes in a Snowstorm

Juncos feed low. They hop along the ground and scratch with both feet at once, kicking back the leaves and loose snow to uncover seed, and they are just as happy on a flat tray or a deck rail. Tree sparrows, white-throated sparrows and mourning doves feed the same way, and cardinals much prefer something flat and wide to a narrow perch. What none of them do well is hang off the side of a tube feeder like a chickadee or a goldfinch.

“Most of what’s sold as a bird feeder is built for the birds that can hang upside down,” Merritt says. “The juncos get whatever falls on the ground. That’s fine in October. After two feet of snow, there is no ground.”

The seed that isn’t buried gets wet, and wet seed is a problem of its own. It clumps, sours and molds within days, and damp, crowded feeding spots are where bird diseases pass from one bird to the next. In the winter of 2020–21, a salmonella outbreak spread through pine siskins at backyard feeders across much of the country, and wildlife agencies in several states asked people to take their feeders down for weeks. Their advice when the feeders went back up: keep seed dry, clean often, and put out only what the birds will finish.

Left: the morning after a storm, snow on the roof and the seed underneath still dry. Right: in May it gets rinsed out and filled with water, and spends the summer as a shaded drinking dish.

Most yards in snow country don’t lack birdseed in winter. They lack seed the birds can actually reach the morning after it snows.

Before the First Real Storm

Merritt is particular about timing. Juncos and American tree sparrows come down from the north in October and November, and once they arrive they tend to stay with the same small flock, working the same handful of yards and hedgerows until spring. Whatever reliable food they find in those first weeks becomes part of the route.

“Hang it before the big one,” he says. “The birds that know where your dish is will be there the morning after. If you wait till it’s already snowing, you’re starting from scratch in the worst week of the year.”

Northern winters don’t leave small birds much room for error. On February 4, 2023, the wind chill on the summit of Mount Washington, across the Connecticut River in New Hampshire, reached 108 below zero, the lowest ever recorded in the United States. On nights far milder than that, a chickadee can burn off close to ten percent of its body weight in fat just to stay warm until dawn, and it has to win most of it back before the next sundown.

A Nor’easter and a Tray Feeder

Merritt Coombs, 77, outside the tin shop in his barn. He roofed barns, churches and farmhouses for forty-six years. These two, the Umbrella and the Cottage Roof, are from the batch he is finishing now.

Merritt spent his working life on roofs, from 1971 until 2017, most of it standing-seam metal on barns and church steeples across Caledonia County. Lorraine, his wife of fifty-three years, ran the house, the garden and the bird feeders, which she considered her department and not his.

In February 2017 Lorraine was off her feet for a few weeks after a hip operation, which meant a lot of time in the chair by the kitchen window with the tray feeder on the porch rail for company. Then a nor’easter left twenty-two inches on Peacham overnight. In the morning the tray was a drift, with a junco standing on top of it, scratching away with both feet and getting nowhere.

“She watched it for twenty minutes and then looked at me,” Merritt says. “Forty-six years I’d been keeping snow off other people’s hay. It seemed a poor show not to manage it for one junco.”

That afternoon he took an offcut of tin left over from the Congregational church roof into the barn, bent a small roof over an old enamel dish and hung it from the maple. When the next storm came through, the juncos were feeding under it while the snow slid off both sides. Lorraine started the second column in the notebook that week.

Built by Someone Who Knows Where Snow Goes

Each roof is cut and bent in the barn and polished by hand at the bench before it is boxed. None of them come out of a mold.

A roofer looks at a bird feeder the way he looks at a house: where will the snow land, where will the water run, and what will it look like in March. The covered feeder is the answer to those three questions.

Sunflower Under One Roof, Millet Under the Other

Two roofs on the same branch, a few feet apart: black-oil sunflower in one dish, white millet in the other.

Lorraine was the one who asked for a second. Cardinals, chickadees and titmice go for black-oil sunflower. Juncos, tree sparrows and mourning doves would rather have white millet. And a single blue jay can clean out a dish in a few minutes while scattering everyone else. With two dishes a few feet apart, the jay can only sit in one of them, and the smaller birds simply use the other.

The Second Column

The notebook on the barn door now runs to three spirals. Merritt’s side is all numbers: inches, dates, which roofs to check. Lorraine’s side reads like a guest book. The first tree sparrow of last season showed up on November 3. The winter of 2020, when evening grosbeaks flooded south into New England, she got a flock of eight that sat under the roof for most of a week. A pileated woodpecker once landed on the roof itself, looked down at the dish, and left.

“I used to write down how much snow came,” Merritt says. “Now somebody writes down who came anyway. I like her column better.”

“Forty-Six Years Keeping the Weather Off People. These Last Ones Are for the Juncos.”

Merritt and Lorraine at the kitchen table, where the second column gets written. She keeps the record. He refills the dish and claims he doesn’t read it.

When their granddaughter Kenna, a nurse in Burlington, offered to put the last batch online for him, she asked what to charge. Merritt thought about it and said forty-five dollars, which turned out to be exactly what he charged in 1985 to flash a chimney. Kenna pointed out that tin, dishes and chain cost a good deal more now. He said the price had been fine in 1985 and he saw no reason to change it. “I want them hanging in people’s maples,” he told her. “Not sitting in a closet waiting to be a Christmas present.”

The first one that left the family went a quarter mile up the road to Ruth Wheeler, ninety-one, who has fed birds off her porch for longer than Merritt has been roofing. She now phones Lorraine most mornings to compare lists. Last Tuesday she had a cardinal and Lorraine didn’t, and she brought it up twice.

“That’s about the size of it,” Merritt says. “A hundred and forty more porches with something under the roof in the morning. Then I’ll call it done.”

Why This Is the Last Batch

The roof of each feeder is bent on the same hand brake Merritt used for flashing and ridge caps: you clamp the sheet, grab the handle and pull it up and over your head, then do it again. His right shoulder has taken that motion for more than fifty years.

This spring the shoulder finally said no. The orthopedist in St. Johnsbury recommended he give up overhead work for good, and Merritt, who is seventy-seven and not one to argue with a scan, put the brake handle down that week.

Before that, he had already bent a winter’s worth of roofs. One hundred and forty of them are stacked on a shelf in the barn, and the rest of the work, fitting the dishes, cutting the chain, the final polish, he can still do sitting at the bench. Kenna thinks they will be gone well before Christmas.

“Forty-six years on ladders and nine years of bird roofs,” he says. “That’s a fair stretch. I’d just rather the last ones were out in the snow doing their job than stacked in the barn.”

A reader in Littleton, New Hampshire, hanging hers on a frosty morning. Her email the next day: two juncos, a pair of cardinals, and “one little striped thing I had to look up.”

Readers Who Already Hung One

What Kenna Gets Asked Most

A Couple More Notes From Readers

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