Peanutizing the Boudoir

Sitting out in the rain is one thing; poking food in every nook and cranny of your roost snag is another. I feel sometimes like I'm documenting some pretty maladaptive behavior on Garrett's part. I call it Peanutizing the Boudoir.

It's natural for a red-headed woodpecker to store food against a rainy (or icy or snowy) day. But really, Garrett--there are so many places to put it--do you really want to poke peanuts, Zick dough and sunflower hearts all over your bedroom tree?

I think about a mouse or opossum climbing up the tree. Or, on one of these rainy warm nights, gack! a raccoon. Snuffling around for food in the rotty wood and reaching in Garrett's cavity and...

I can't even think about it.

Garrett doesn't worry. He just keeps finding new places for roasted peanuts.  You can see one just above the sawn-off branch stub. He'll have to go around back to store the one he's got now.

Garrett is pretty bossy about peanuts and Zick dough. He lets the other woodpeckers eat them sometimes. Other times he chases them on merry flashing flights around the yard. Garrett tried suet when he first hit the yard almost two weeks ago and didn't much like it, so the hairy and downy woodpeckers (hairy on left, downy on right) resort to eating a lot more suet now, because Garrett will let them.

 I watch a downy woodpecker doing something I've seen hairy and red-bellied and now red-headed woodpeckers do. When they're processing a food item, and they're trying not to drop it, they'll extend the folded wings to try to contain it. It's a little like a hawk mantling its prey, but the wings are kept folded. It reminds me of someone trying to catch something between their knees when their hands are occupied. I was happy to get these shots of the behavior.

See how the wing is dropped to help contain the peanut? I'm reminded that birds do every amazing thing they do without the help of hands. Just a bill and feet, and sometimes wings standing in for hands.

Which includes excavation. Garrett continues to enlarge his bedroom every day.  

Ptooo!

gak gak gak

It's easier for him to get in and out now.

and out he swings in one smooth motion.

He's not as vocal as he'd be were there other red-headed woodpeckers around to talk to, but occasionally I hear Garrett sounding off. The only call he's used is a rolling Kwirrrrr Kwirrrrr. I caught him in what looked like an advertising display yesterday.

He sat for a long time looking out of the cavity, then emerged and puffed his head feathers up until his head looked like a red rubber ball.

All puffed out, he swung side to side in exaggerated arcs, calling Kwirr Kwirr Kwirrr as he reached each side.

It really looked like cavity advertisement to me. Please, Garrett, if you're trying to attract a mate, not there. I'd have to put electric fencing around the dang tree. And you know I would.

Right after the display, I got my first and so far only nice flight shot. Mmmmm. It takes bright sunlight and a quick trigger finger to get that. Remember I'm standing atop my computer table with my elbows on the windowsill, shooting at an angle through double-pane glass. It's not ideal, but then neither am I.

I'm getting the most out of Garrett, because he's the Mostest Bird.**

**Anyone remember Man o' War, the "mostest hoss?" Well, Garrett's like that to me.

Following Garrett

Speaking of rarely-noticed things...

I mentioned in an earlier post that both the red-bellied woodpecker and red-headed woodpecker are in the genus Melanerpes. One of the hallmarks of the genus is a propensity to store food (think of the acorn woodpecker, infamous for pocking cabin siding with acorn-stuffed holes).

 Here's Garrett's golden midline. This is one of my favorite pictures of him. A bit penguiny, full of character. Many red-headeds show considerably more blush on the belly than Garrett; sometimes it is almost as rich a color as the red-bellied's. The first time I saw it was when examining museum skins. I never knew they had such colorful bellies! but then woodpeckers usually have their bellies up against tree trunks.

Here's the Melanerpes mark on the red-belly. 

I'm not the only one playing paparazzo to Garret's movie star. Phoebe caught these wonderful photos of him sipping from a rain puddle on the deck. 

       

and twisting a peanut from our feeder. I feed roasted cocktail peanuts. You used to be able to find them unsalted, but no more. The salt doesn't seem to hurt anyone.

Sometimes the outtakes are more fun than the best photos. Garrett plays peek-a-boo with me.

Who's there?

Give me a hint.

Oh, I get it. It's Garrett!

I knew it was you all along.

And I knew it was you, too. Good morning! 

Pensive Garrett, looking his handsomest on a dark day.

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....

Red-headed Woodpecker. At Our Feeder. No, Really!

I went running Sunday morning, even though the road was snow-covered and what wasn’t snow was ice. Thanks to ice and circumstance, I’d taken an unprecedented three days off in the last week, and I needed to get out. The sun was brilliant and right in my eyes; it was 22 degrees and as long as I kept moving I was fine. Chet and I lingered in the cemetery, he sitting on my lap as I sat on a headstone. We warm up his paws that way. I wrap my arms around him and rest my cheek on his back and we just sit. I sometimes think that if we were lost in the woods we would sit that way until we figured out what to do.

As I came up our driveway headed home I saw fresh bootprints in the snow and the words BIG NEWS drawn in a drift. I quickened my pace. Came up the sidewalk to find Phoebe still in PJ’s, clutching my camera with 300 mm. telephoto lens, frantically waving me inside. “There’s a red-headed woodpecker at the feeder RIGHT NOW! Get in here!”

She was the one who had run out to look for me; she the one who'd scratched M. HURRY HOME and BIG NEWS in the snow on the driveway. And now she was following this vagrant bird from window to window, frantically keeping tabs on him, willing me to get home before he flew away forever. She shoved the camera in my hands and pulled me to the kitchen window.

You can't buy a 15-year-old girl like that. You have to make them, with a healthy assist from Luck and Fate. This is Phoebe, having just found a short-eared owl's roosting nook (yes, they roost on the ground), and the fresh warm poop left by the flushed bird.

She knows how to make her mama's heart sing. And the best part is it thrills her just as much. More on that later.

There he was!  just off the kitchen window in all his natty glory, pecking away at the peanut feeder. It was a little like seeing a unicorn in the garden. Phoebs had taken a bunch of documentary shots already. I flipped all the way out, then started shooting. Red-headed woodpeckers are vanishingly rare in Ohio now. A couple of pairs used to breed in a stand of giant oaks over a cow pasture about two miles from our home, but have since deserted that place. We’ve had  flyovers every year in September, October and May, most of them spotted from our tower (red-headeds fly slowly and very high, so they can watch for hawks) but only one other red-headed woodpecker has landed in our yard in 20 years. That one ate corn for a morning and was gone before Bill got home from work. I've never forgotten that bird, that lost chance to share its miraculous beauty.

Of course, Bill was away at an Ohio Ornithological Society board meeting. Irony of ironies. He was missing his absolute # 1 favorite bird while figuring out how to make Ohio birding better for everyone else. It about killed us to know that.

Over the next seven hours, that woodpecker tried everything we had. He contemplated suet; he tried black oil sunflower (but seemed not to know how to open the seeds). He ate peanuts from our peanut feeder, and cached several in the bark of a dead tree just inside the woods. While he sat in our sycamore, I moved quietly out and replenished the Zick Dough in our birch log feeder, leaving conspicuous piles on the deck railing, too. He watched me. And not five minutes later he was tasting what I’m sure was his first beakful of homemade manna. From then on, he bopped between roasted cocktail peanuts and Zick Dough, storing quantities of both in the dead tree’s bark.

He was ugly to all the other birds, something I found oddly endearing. This newcomer, this rara avis, acting as if he owned the place. I was ready to sign the title over. The kids were enthralled, running from window to window to watch him. I was beside myself. How could this happen again, with Bill away?

I opened the deck sliders and sat quietly in a rocking chair and clicked away at him as he fed only 12’ away. He wasn’t bothered by the sound of the shutter. What a guy.

Lazily scratching his face on one of our feeder perches. Tip from my slim archive of bird photography pointers: Put the food in holes in a rotty log (birch is my favorite!), then prop some groovy looking dead branches all around your feeders, so you can get natural looking photos. You can only go so far with a photo of a bird on a feeder. Because ultimately, all feeders are pretty ugly compared to a weathered branch or a rotting birch log. If you plant birches in your yard, you'll always have rotty logs to play with.

Because birches love to grow, but they love to die even more.

Needless to say, we fell completely in love with Garrett, as Phoebe named him, and the feeling seemed mutual. He watched to see what I'd put out for him next, and sampled it as soon as I was inside. He's bombproof, ignoring the slap of our shutters as we aim our lenses at him from inside the darkened living room only ten feet away. But would he hang around for us?

And because I know you'll ask, here's the recipe for Improved Zick Dough. 

With the whole story about why it needed to be improved. More Garrett in my next post.