Can We Talk about Woodpeckers?

This is a very good time of year to talk about woodpeckers. It's the best time of year to watch them, with no leaves to hide them, and with feeders luring them in, right to our yards.

I had a red-bellied woodpecker years ago who I called Ruby, for the little red feathers on her forehead. She became incredibly tame, almost like a pet. It was Ruby, hitting my studio window in 2009, who inspired my crop netting window screen, placed about 10" out from the windows on a PVC frame, that has saved countless lives in the years since. It's normally all but invisible. Only occasionally does a wet snow give me this view from the studio!

To find out how to screen your windows with crop netting (trust me, I can photograph right through it!), go here: https://bwdmagazine.com/downloads/JZ_COL_True_Nature.pdf

 I thought I was seeing Ruby's ghost when this bejeweled female (see her tiny red bindi?) showed up just outside the studio window. Lovely! 

 

This is one of the reddest red-bellies I've ever beheld. He's absolutely suffused with red! And really has a red belly. Generally when you see extra color, you can guess that a bird is older, or has more testosterone than the rest, or both. I've been looking for this gentleman and haven't seen him since I took this photo.

But that's OK. I've got plenty of glam woodpeckers to admire this winter. I'd love to think that this peanut and suet loving adult female yellow-bellied sapsucker is the same little gal I've had since she showed up in her brown weeds as a juvenile in November 2018. She'd be in her fifth winter now, and I think this brilliant plumage she's sporting lines up with that pretty well. She acts the same, uses the same perches; perches very close to my studio window and is totally unperturbed by me moving and photographing her just inside. 

She is a lot less aggressive than some sapsuckers I've observed, sharing the Lifelong Suet Feeder with a Carolina chickadee

and taking her own sweet time when a male hairy woodpecker (who is just about exactly her size) shows up. 

She even shares it peacefully with a downy woodpecker. The Lifelong Suet Feeder is made right here in Ohio by my friend Link Llewellyn. It's not cheap, but no raccoon is ever going to get suet out of it, and you can take it apart, wipe it off, and chuck the whole thing in the dishwasher. Definitely the cleanest way to feed suet, keeping the fat off the feathers, and that and the coon proof features is the whole point for me.

I'm so happy to have these gorgeous woodpeckers here. Even had a yellow-shafted flicker drilling for ants in the yard today, January 15!  Woodpeckers are so animated, such fun to watch, and so easy to attract with suet and peanut halves. (Except for flickers, who resist my efforts to charm them). 

And they hate starlings, too!

While Oscar was here, the queen of woodpeckers made an appearance just off the feeding area. It was so wonderful to show this majestic to him from the warmth of the studio, to watch him watching her through binoculars. 

It's a pileated, and that golden-brown forehead says it's a female. 

In all the years I've fed woodpeckers, I've never had a pileated come in to eat. I keep a regular suet cage as well as the fancy Lifetime suet feeders, and I keep hoping that one day I'll look out to see a monstrous crow-sized woodpecker clinging to the suet feeder or hitching up the post. I can dream!

From left: Downy, red-bellied, hairy.

Until then, I'm happy with what I have. I keep trying to snag the perfect woodpecker combo. I love comparing sizes between hairy and red-bellied, hairy and downy. 

When you see them together (hairy on the left, below; downy on the right) it's such fun to wonder how these not-very-closely related woodpeckers evolved nearly identical plumage. Get this: they aren't even in the same genus any more; hairy has been put in genus Leuconotopicus, while the downy stays in Picoides. The going theory is that downies are hairy mimics. One study by Cornell University's Elliot Miller postulates that the downy is trying to look like the more aggressive hairy for some dominance advantage that is not clear to me. Why would a downy woodpecker need to mimic a hairy? Are hairies poisonous to eat? (I'm only half kidding here. Birds are weird, and so is science, and that's why I love them both).

It's just another of the mysteries that common birds have all locked up. I like wondering about them.

If you do, too, subscribe to BWD Magazine here.  I write a column and few other things for every issue, and help edit it, too. The March/April 2023 issue is in final production! and psst...I know the cover artist...

Reading Summer's Best Book: Animal Tracking on Dean's Fork

 It's good to have a place that fixes you, a guaranteed cure for whatever ails you. Dean's Fork is a medicine that I take regularly. When I have the time to do the whole road, it's a seven mile roundtrip of cure.

 It's downhill all the way. So it's uphill all the way home. Which is kind of cool--I just cruise along letting gravity and curiosity take me farther than I probably ought to go. It's easy to go all the way to the end. Then I pay the price coming back, but the uphill is so gradual and I stop so much that I don't even notice it.

 A midsummer morning is best, for the chicory's out then. After a rain is awesome. My "book" is freshly imprinted with good things to read.  Raccoon:

 A fresh kill, probably by a screech-owl, spattered across the road. The little owl probably reached into a roost hole in the wee hours and pulled his supper out, then fluttered down to the road with it to kill and pluck it. A downy woodpecker would be a pretty good talon-ful for a screech owl, and it would need room to work. Of course it could have been a Cooper's hawk who dun it, too. Haven't seen evidence of sharp-shins nesting in the area this year.

It's a downy woodpecker, most likely a juvenile. Juvenile downies are old enough now for all of their feathers to be out of sheath, so I'm not going by that. The hint is in the yellow staining on the tips of the tail feathers, upper left. That came from the sawdust and droppings in the nest cavity, where the bird sat for a long time. The other hint is the lack of wear on the feathers. By this time of year, adult downies have a lot of wear on their tired feathers. While we are looking at this, dig the tribal coolness of the pattern on those tail feathers!

I think this is an American toadlet, about to leave its puddle. It's maturing too early to be a gray tree frog. Deans Fork is a giant herp factory, with its deep, persistent puddles in the truck tire ruts all along its shaded length. This spring was a total bust for mountain chorus frogs, spring peepers and wood frogs. Even American toads had a terrible time, breeding as they do in May. Very few made it, because it started out nice and wet and then dried up completely. The rains started in June, too late for the early breeders. But the gray tree frogs, which rely on midsummer rains for ephemeral puddles, are having a banner year. Most puddles I see now are packed with gray tree frog taddies. This is why amphibians live a long, long time. Not every year allows them to reproduce.

The old gristmill that used to be a destination for me is now just a roof on a pile of chestnut, thanks to the Derecho of June 29, 2012. It is still beautiful, but I miss the mill. This is what she was in her golden years, before the storm.

And now, all fallen in. It feels a little odd to have been here long enough to be able to reminisce about its past glory, but not as odd, I expect, as it would feel to be here long enough to remember when it was a working gristmill. I suspect the old fellow who still runs cattle here can remember that. I have run into him a couple of times. He makes me laugh because he cusses so much, wrassling tractor implements all by himself on a road where nobody goes.

I look back up the Fork and am thankful for the black barn, still standing proud, her slate roof still intact. "When the roof goes, the barn goes." DOD, talking to me again.

Down near the end, my second set of bobcat tracks, these from a small female. The first were from a big male. You'll remember these from the last bobkit post. The way the green stone kept his inside toe from hitting the mud.

The same animal:

And in a wet spot nearby, a mink! (Or, correction: probably a fox squirrel, thanks to an anonymous commenter.) Bunching up his tracks in fours, his odd little crescent-shaped heels giving him away. Hind paws are the bigger ones, on either side of the two front paws. Picture him humping along rabbit-like, his hindfeet striking ahead of his forefeet. That would be a squirrely way to travel more than a minky way.

I smile big to find tracks from a tiny box turtle, dragging his tiny turtle tail in the fresh mud, headed to get a drink. His plastron is only an inch across. Box turtle tracks are rare, rare, rare, and these are my first set of juvenile box turtle tracks! Knowing there is a juvenile out there, knowing that somehow two box turtles bumped into each other a couple of springs ago and the female managed to lay eggs that June and miraculously get them past all the coons and possums and snakes for three months until they hatched, makes me SO happy. Taking the Dean's Fork cure, I am. Reading a really good book in this mud. 

My friend Michael, a daylily breeder, calls these "ditch lilies." A European import, now in bloom all along the roadsides. Now I call them that, too. I've got the damn things spreading all through my front flower bed. As soon as they're done blooming they're going, to make more room for things I really want. It will be about the third time I've been sure I've dug them all out. They always win, and come back stronger than ever. D'oh! Ditch lilies!

But they look mighty fine down here on Dean's Fork.

Bacon and I look back up the Fork.

Blue sky has been very rare this summer, and I'm loving its reflection on the water.

I can never get enough of this vista, looking back up toward the black barn. 

Sometimes you get a dog in your vista, sometimes you don't. 

We'll keep loping down Dean's Fork on Sunday. 

Whatcha Doin' Up There?

Snowy gray days, up in the tower, writing. I can see the birds and they can see me. For years, they've come to see me when I'm sitting up here. They know I'm the person who fills the feeders. The suet dough feeder, in particular.

Suet dough is expensive enough to make, in both cents and elbow grease, so that I don't put a whole lot out at one time. Should a flock of starlings happen through, I don't want half a batch to disappear down their greedy throats. So I put it out a couple of handfuls at a time throughout the day, especially when I see bluebirds. The bluebirds know this. We're in tune with each other.

The downy woodpeckers know it, too. They come and sit on the top of the chimney and stare at me until they get my attention.

Hello. It's Zick, right? Yes. It's me, Downy. We've met at the feeder. Well. Ahem. The suet dough is gone. That stuff you make for us. It's gone. I'm just sayin'.
Even little Snowflake, the leucistic junco, came up to check in with me. She's hooked on suet dough. We think this is her second year with us, but she's whiter than she was last year. See Bill of the Birds' nice pictures of her both this year and last year.
Of all the birds, the bluebirds are the most shameless beggars. They line up, all eight of them, on the gutters.They clean up the dough in the dish, and then they fly up to the high ridgepole where they close in to control me with their minds.Hello. We enjoy your hospitality, and the food you serve. Now bring more of it. Please.

The fame of your Suet Dough has spread far and wide in Bluebird Land. We have brought our best friends to your fine establishment today. Please do not disappoint them. Are you almost done with that sandhill crane chapter?

Mether. I do not like it when you leave our tower fort to go put out more suet dough. I think you pay entirely too much attention to those bluebirds. You need to at least finish a paragraph before you run down the stairs again. There is someone else here with needs, too. And it is me.In the interest of full disclosure, the photographer rolled Chet Baker's cutelip out before taking the picture. Folded ears were original equipment. Actually, I used to roll his cutelip out. Now what I have to do is tuck his dangling manly jowls in.

And, because some Janie-come-lately is gonna ask, sure as death and taxes:

Zick's Suet Dough

Melt 1 cup peanut butter
with 1 cup lard

(the microwave works great).
Wal-Mart sells lard in big green and white tubs, and yellow cornmeal in big 5 lb. bags, as well as cheap quick oats and flour. Mix dry ingredients separately:

2 cups yellow cornmeal
2 cups quick oats
1 cup flour.

Stir melted lard/peanut butter mixture into dry ingredients.

Allow to cool, and serve crumbled in an open dish. Store in jars at room temperature. Nice measuring tip: A 40 oz. jar of peanut butter holds five cups. Empty out a jar, then pack it with lard to measure five cups of that. Easier than measuring individual cups, the most onerous part of making it in bulk. Don't be tempted to guesstimate amounts, or you'll get a greasy mess.
I make this recipe, sextupled, using the biggest lobster pot I own, every couple of weeks. What I get in return is a never-ending guilt trip from eight bluebirds and sundry other zillions of birds. It's a problem that only compounds.