The Best Woodpeckers of All

I call North Bend State Park in Harrisville, WV, my happy place. I also call it Birding Valhalla. That's because there's no place else I can think of where you can see 80 red-headed woodpeckers in a single day. 

They're here because the forest that was flooded to make the lake killed a lot of big trees. 

And those big trees were perfect for red-headed woodpeckers to drill out for their nesting cavities. 

To my amazement, we saw a bird making a cavity on July 25. Well after one would think they'd be excavating a nest cavity. Perhaps it's to be a roost cavity, even a winter roost hole. It was pecking away!

David laughed out loud to see it dip in, take bills full of sawdust and chips, and ptoo! them out into the breeze.

I was delighted to capture the moment for him. PTOO!!

All around us, red-headed woodpeckers were feeding fledged young, doing crazy loop-de-loops after dragonflies and dog day cicadas in the big spaces over the lake. It was wonderful.

There really is nothing I don't love about red-headed woodpeckers. The best woodpeckers of all.

But even as I enjoy North Bend, I know it's a limited-time offer. For the nesting snags they use, after more than a decade of standing in water, are falling into the drink. More are down every time I visit.

I was trying to shoot a poignant photo of two cavity trees in mud when this little character gave a metallic chip and bobbed into view.

It's this year's young Louisiana waterthrush, assuring me that, snags or not, there will always be something interesting going on at North Bend.

The double-crested cormorant and the great blue heron agreed as they posed against the elegiac wrecks of trees. Such riches from dead wood.

We stopped to examine the hollow bole of a sycamore, and I remembered why I love Mary Jane so much. She stuck her head in the space and sang a mysterious and compelling Native American song, her beautiful voice resonating and echoing across the quiet lake. Now, who does that? My friend Mary Jane, that's who. 

Because I look down so much, gazing into the water, looking for dragonflies and fish and water plants, I often miss what's overhead. David and Mary Jane pointed out this second Science Chimp stumper. Now, how did that snakeskin get there, 12' up in a dead snag that's standing in several feet of water? Did a snake somehow climb up there to shed? Nope.

They had just found a great crested flycatcher nest. The snakeskin had been airlifted up there. Great crested flycatchers like to trail a snakeskin out of their nestholes, perhaps as a deterrent to avian predators, but maybe "chust for nice." When I was a kid, I found a GCFL nest in our woods in Richmond, Virginia, by seeing a long trailing strand of Fiberglas insulation, stolen from a house under construction, trailing from a cavity. 

The snakeskin waved in the breeze in the most delightful way, and I felt lucky to have friends who can spot such things, and doubly lucky to be the one who gets to tell them how such mysterious things come to pass.

If canoeing North Bend with me sounds like something you'd like to do, there are still some spaces left in the Bird Watcher's Digest Reader Rendezvous coming up August 22-24, 2014.

Check it out here: Birding Valhalla With Julie Zickefoose

And in a lovely bit of serendipity, my pal Floridacracker has just posted a fascinating photoessay on a Florida park that's managed with fire for woodpeckers, including the endangered red-cockaded and the beloved red-headed. His post is called  A Place for Redheads. Go read it! With red-headed woodpeckers, it's all about living amongst large trees with an open understory. Whether that understory is water, as at North Bend in WV, or savannah, as at Ochlockonee, they need that kind of space between the trees because they're flycatching woodpeckers. I thought it was pretty cool that we two blogosaurs (Floridacracker started blogging in the spring of 2005, and I followed in December of that year) were groovin' on the same birds at the same time, many hundreds of miles apart.

Great Crested Flycatcher Family Photos

Watching these great-crested flycatchers going about their business made me feel a little better about my life. They never sat still, either. Even when they paused in feeding or cleaning up after their young, they were always looking for the next insect to snatch in mid-air.

 The rhythm of this old sycamore snag was so lovely, such a perfect spot for nesting flycatchers.  This is eastern North America's only cavity-nesting flycatcher, which I suppose is because it's eastern North America's only flycatcher in the genus Myiarchus. Ash-throated and brown-crested flycatchers (also Myiarchus)  nest in cavities in the West. I noted that the flycatchers had not added a trailing snakeskin to their nest. Most GCFL nests have something trailing out of the cavity.  Popular speculation holds that the flycatchers are trying to "frighten off predators" with a snakeskin, but the first one I ever found, behind my house in Richmond, VA, had a long piece of pink attic insulation trailing out of the hole! They'll use plastic, bark...a lot of different materials, leading ornithologists to conclude that they just like to have something trailing out of the hole...I was privileged to watch that nest and even see the babies, perfect miniatures of the "Wheeps!" as we called their parents, line up on a branch outside the cavity to be fed.

North Bend's lake, less than a decade flooded, offers a paradise for cavity-nesting birds in its huge stand of dead trees, protected by several feet of water. This cuts down tremendously on snake and raccoon predation, and pretty much eliminates squirrel and mouse predation. It really is a Brigadoon for cavity-nesters.

I could tell the flycatcher babies were pretty old, both by their voices and by the size and coarseness of the insects being brought to them.

 Not all the flycatchers' prey is winged. They do some gleaning, too. This might be a fishing spider, or a wolf spider. Whatever it is, it's a big 'un. 

Imagine having something that leggy stuffed into your mouth. 

With each delivery, the flycatchers took a drop-off.

Another fecal sac about to hit the water. Look at the beautiful rufous tail of the great-crested flycatcher..

More dragonfly on the way. The flycatchers followed a predictable pattern of perching, first pausing above the nest to assess the area, then dropping directly to the cavity.

 Insert insect in slot.

Pause to consider your next move. Repeat. 

The young will leave the nest at about Day 15, and be fed for about another three weeks. The literature says in general the young are flying strongly by that day. The only other option is a splashdown, and judging from the number of bass fishermen haunting the shallows, a struggling nestling wouldn't last long. I wish this beautiful family all the best. Feed 'em up!

Great Crested Flycatchers!

And that pewee-lookin' bird with yellow below that Phoebe found for me? Get this: Pewees have wingbars and crested heads. She had it almost zeroed in. But she had found a pair of great-crested flycatchers, and they were tending a nest!

And not just any nest, but a glorious weathered branch stub in a sycamore. And it was low, and the birds were tame, as you will see. What a find!

 The pair was busy feeding young which might have been fairly well along, to judge from the prey items they were getting. I could hear them in the cavity, voicing "wheep!" calls just like their parents'. This is something unique about flycatchers. Even as little chicks, their voices don't vary much from how their parents sound. Flycatcher calls and songs are innate, not learned. So you could take a phoebe, a pewee or a great-crested flycatcher, just to name a few, raise them in complete isolation, and they'd still have a perfect song and call from the get-go. That's not true of most songbirds.  You could have knocked me over with a feather the first time I held a newly-hatched phoebe in my palm, and it said, "Chip!" just like an adult phoebe.

So this pair of great-crests is hauling in dragonflies as fast as they can. Not the first time I've wished I'd spent more time on odonates. It pains the Science Chimp greatly not to be able to identify the great crested's prey items. Please chip in if you can.

 The birds were bombproof, eyeing me but slowing down not one whit as I fired away from just below the nest.

Input, output...they carried away sizable fecal sacs of processed dragonfly with each visit.

 The original disposable diaper: the fecal sac.

 Fecal sacs are neatly encased in a mucoid coating which, if handled gently, leaves no residue on bill (or fingers, she notes).

 The bird carries them away for hygienic purposes, and to keep predators from keying in on the nest location. Birds love to drop them over water.

More great-crested family photos anon.

Kleppers!

I grew up watching “All in the Family” with my parents and older sister. We loved its edgy humor. In one episode, Edith Bunker (Jean Stapleton) comes home from shopping with an item she hadn’t intended to buy and never paid for, and becomes convinced that she’s a kleptomaniac. She turns to the camera, a look of abject horror crossing her face. “I don’ wanna be a kleppa!” she wails.

Well, I’ve been collecting incidences of kleptoparasitism here in my yard. Kleptoparasitism describes one animal stealing food from another. Cardinals, it seems, are good at it. This May, I was watching a juvenile eastern bluebird struggling with a large black beetle on the lawn beneath my studio window. An adult male cardinal flew down and displaced the bluebird, which dropped its catch. The cardinal masticated the beetle briefly, then dropped it. Perhaps it was distasteful. Perhaps the klepper cardinal was just being mean.
On August 11, 2005, in the midst of a severe drought, I was watching a robin foraging in the lawn for grasshoppers, there being no earthworms within a yard of the surface. I was feeling bad for the robin, which was processing a hard old crusty grasshopper, when an adult male cardinal came down, bumped the robin and grabbed the hopper. I commemorated that event in a watercolor. I couldn’t help but put a triumphant glint in the cardinal’s eye, and a kind of forlorn look in the robin’s, because that’s what I saw. They’re standing on crispy grass amidst birch leaves that turned brown and fell off the trees—in August.

But the third and most recent instance is my favorite. On May 28, 2008, I was sitting on the front porch, having just called my mom for her 88th birthday. I was idly watching an adult Carolina wren which was perched on the telephone wire. It had a big white moth in its bill, and it was hesitant to come to its nest, which was in a copper bucket just over my head, under the eave. As it perched there, trying to make up its mind whether to blow its cover and bring the food to its young (news flash, Mr. Wren. I put the bucket up there; I know perfectly well you have five babies in it), a large brown bird flew directly at the wren, bumped it chest to chest, and snatched the moth. The wren spiraled down to the ground, caught completely off guard. The brown bird flew right past my astonished face, and as it passed I caught bright rufous in its outer tail feathers and yellow on its belly—a great crested flycatcher! Wow!
How I wish I could have photographed the incident. I had to settle for a photo of one very pissed-off and mothless Carolina wren, who was doubtless wondering what the heck just happened. Nope, didn’t get a photo of the perp. Sorry. But maybe I'll do a painting of the chest-butting, moth-snatching flycatcher assaulting the wren. See? We'll never be able to completely replace artists.

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, I would point out that in all three instances, I was calmly watching a common bird going about its business when the kleptoparastism occurred. I was certainly not expecting such cool behavioral interactions; they were completely serendipitous. There is much to recommend watching common birds go about their business, and then making a written record of what you observe.

Because, in the words of R.T. Peterson, "If you don't write it down, it never happened."