This is bird note.

Yellow-eyed juncos can be found shuffling through leaf litter in the southeast corner of Arizona and central Mexico,

searching for tasty seeds from pines and oaks.

And although these fire-eyed birds stay within the same general area year-round,

they sometimes make a migration of sorts, not from north to south, but from the high mountains

to the lowlands or the other way around.

It's called altitudinal migration.

In the warm summer months, some yellow-eyed juncos prefer to nest at higher elevations,

where their nests on the ground are less vulnerable to predators.

But as winter approaches, the scarcity of food in the snowy peaks often pushes the juncos back down to the desert floor.

This altitudinal migration is common for many bird species that live along mountain slopes.

Another intriguing migrant, the American Dipper, catches its meals by diving into the frigid streams of

mountain ranges in the northwest. In colder seasons, when their watery cafeterias freeze solid,

dippers migrate down slope and downstream, where flowing water continues to provide a bounty of

tasty morsels. To learn more about the many quirky ways birds migrate,

started our website, birdnote.org.

I'm Ariana Rimmel.