The preen oil gives off an odor, she says. She tested this hypothesis on incubating female juncos. She collected preen oil from a different bird species and placed it on the female juncos’ nests.

That might be what happened to one of the baby birds you discovered. Some birds reuse nests, but juncos rarely do, which is likely why your birds chose a different hanging pot for their second brood.

But they’re also known to like some habitats that people provide. “Around people, juncos may nest in or underneath buildings,” the Cornell Lab says.

The Outside Story Most winters, the dark-eyed junco is one of the most common birds at my feeder. While I rarely see juncos in summer, except when hiking in the mountains, small flocks of juncos ...

While juncos nest throughout the boreal forest of the northern U.S. and Canada, birds in northerly populations retreat southward in winter. These are the birds that we see at our feeders.

“In about 11 days, they fledge,” read an article in Washington’s Key Peninsula News. “Two weeks after that, at the seasoned ...

Going down the mountain, at Myrtle Point we saw a junco on a tall spray of sand myrtle. From the bird’s nervous scolding, we knew there must be a nest or young close by, and so we searched the ...

Reed and her colleagues watched more than 400 junco nests in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia for nine breeding seasons, boosting testosterone in some males but not others. The results are ...

Blake Clinkard shot this video of a Junco nest near Otter Lake on Manitoulin Island in July 2025, showing the momma bird doing a fine job feeding her youngsters while keeping them safe and warm.