Red-headed Woodpecker: The Saga Continues

Garrett enjoys whole corn. I knew he would. 

Bill got home late Sunday night and awoke Monday morning to Garrett’s red, white and Superman-hair blue beauty. He and I took photos and reveled in having such a bird—such a BIRD! coming to our very own deck. Phewwwww! He got to see Garrett! And then Bill had to take off again the next day, to meet with optics companies at a hunting trade show in Las Vegas, where they tout the latest weapons and run video loops of “great kills,” which is about as opposite as you can get from staying home in Appalachian Ohio photographing a red-headed woodpecker. What he does to keep a roof over our heads…if you want to kill me, send me to Vegas. The most hostile and forbidding Zick habitat imaginable. As my friend Liz says, "Never been, but I hear there are birds around the edges."

Here's Bill getting himself a dose of serenity before he took off again.

 

Liam manned his usual station on the living room couch and called us whenever Garrett showed up.

Chet Baker, who needs to be swaddled in Polarfleece all winter, found it a bit off-putting, all the attention this fabulous bird was getting.

Sorry, Chet, but you're going to have to get used to seeing Mether and Daddeh all preoccupied.

photo by Phoebe Linnea Thompson

I use our old Scotch rocker, which came over from Scotland with a our late aunt's grandmother and is one of the oldest things in our house, as a sort of blind and monopod, resting my elbows on its back while I hand-hold my camera. Bill gets better shots because he uses a tripod and a better lens. I tell him my shots are good enough for a blog.

Garrett is no shrinking violet. Red-headed woodpeckers are hard-wired to be aggressive. If you think about their plumage, the bird is one big HELLO HERE I AM! His black and white wings flash in flight; his all-red head is the avian equivalent of warpaint. Plains Indians used the heads of red-headed woodpeckers as battle ornament; it was the Cherokee's talisman of war as well.  He’s like Texas toilet paper; he don’t take sh-t off nobody. One study of aggressive interactions between red-headed woodpeckers and starlings showed that the woodpeckers initiated 51 of 62 interactions. They are able to successfully  defend their nest cavities from takeover by starlings. According to the Birds of North America species account, even pileated woodpeckers will defer to red-headed woodpeckers in an argument over a nesting cavity. Those poor sweet retiring vanishing flickers should take a page from the red-headed’s book.

 

This old photo of Buck the Bull shows the habitat a couple of miles from our home where red-headed woodpeckers used to breed. Habitat like that--with big mature oaks over grass--is hard to find. The habitat is still there, but the birds are inexplicably gone.

So why have red-headed woodpeckers  become so terribly rare? Well, they need mature oaks and hickories to produce the nut crops they need to survive the winter. And they need those huge trees to be widely spaced with a grassy savanna beneath. Where do you find habitat like that? Around here, hardwood trees like oaks and hickories are never allowed to get huge any more. They’re cut for timber when they’re still teenagers. And what comes in after the big trees are cut is thick young second growth, a habitat the birds can’t use. Red-headed woodpeckers need an open understory because they are primarily insectivores. They catch much of their food on the wing, and they still-hunt like bluebirds do, plunging down into the grass to capture grasshoppers and caterpillars. They’re the most heavily insectivorous of all North American woodpeckers, in fact, which is why they’re also the most strongly migratory—most of them clear out as soon as the insects die back with frost.

So habitat loss is one huge factor, and pesticides are another. You can’t go spraying forests for gypsy moths and expect to still see red-headed woodpeckers. Agricultural chemicals are death to them, too. Many birds get hit on the roads taking grasshoppers off the pavement. They fly low and slow and forage on the ground. My father noticed in his lifetime that they’d vanished from many parts of Iowa where they had once thrived, and he theorized that roadkills played a part. I suspect that chemicals worked a much deadlier magic on their population, but Dad and I never agreed on DDT, Dieldrin, Chlordane…

The Birds of North America species account authors (Kimberly G. Smith et. al.) speculatively link the RHWO's demise to the disappearance and possible extinction of a grasshopper that was formerly abundant in the Midwest. Think about that, and then wonder if man had anything to do with that. I don't tend to wonder long when you're talking about agricultural pesticides and insect abundance. 

 

I don’t know where this little fellow (or gal; red-headed woodpeckers are sexually monomorphic) came from, but he dropped out of the sky like a freshly-wrapped present. The weather turned cold right before he appeared, going from the 50’s to daytime highs in the 20’s, and I’m guessing that smoked him out and sent him looking for supplemental food. We were charmed at how readily he inspected our feeders and sampled our offerings. And I was flattered that he likes my cooking best of all.

 

I was so excited all the day he arrived that I was good for nothing but running from window to window shooting photos. When I finally figured out he meant to stay awhile, I worked off my nervous energy making Zick Dough. Eight batches of Zick Dough, eight large peanut jars full. It’ll go fast in this weather. I so want him to stay. Eight batches worth, I want him to stay.

The next morning he came in around 8:30. I hollered to Bill; he got a bunch of nice photos; we marveled and for the rest of the day I looked out the windows about twice a minute. Got some nice photos, too, especially when it warmed up a bit and I could throw open the glass sliders and shoot through clear morning air instead of double-pane glass.

Phoebe and Liam and I went on our run and she pointed out a diving pileated, and that made it a six-woodpecker day for me: red-headed, yellow-shafted flicker, hairy, downy and redbellied being the other five. I’d like to buy a sapsucker, Pat.

We robbed the neighbor’s deer feeder of some of its whole corn, and I brought a pocketful home. Not five minutes passed before Garrett had found it and was stuffing corn into the rotty bits of our young sycamore that lost its top in a windstorm fall before last. 

He looks like he means to stay, and that makes us very, very happy.

Adding sunflower hearts, that makes five things Garrett has accepted at our feeding stations: whole corn, Zick dough, cocktail peanuts, suet, and sunflower hearts. Going to buy a bunch of grapes next time I go to the store. Pears weren't such a hit. Not that I'm putting out food specially for him, understand....