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...

Hope Is a Calf, Hope is a Bird

Beeches dance in the greening woods. Their leaves are frozen as if being blown by an invisible west wind. On the east slopes where they get some sun, their leaves are still russet; deep in the hollers they have bleached to ghost white. That doesn’t make sense to me, but it’s what I’m seeing. Sometimes the things that don't make empirical sense are the interesting ones. 

Not the cattle I was watching, but I found this photo from April 30, 2015, that shows those fresh calf-whites so beautifully. Oh, I love seeing little calves pop against the spring grass! 

In one of the games I play to keep my brain moving forward, I’m gunning for 7 woodpeckers today.  I’ve got pileated, red-bellied, red-headed, yellow bellied sapsucker, hairy. The sapsucker and the red-headed are real scores. I identified both by their sounds: the sapsucker drums an irregular staccatto tattoo that no other woodpecker does.  Tak-a-tak, tak-tak, tak...The red-headed yells QUEERK!! like no other woodpecker. And now all I need is downy and flicker to complete the complement of 7 possible species here, or in Ohio overall. Unless I'm forgetting one, those are all the woodpeckers possible in my state, and I can get them all on one hike from door to door! Nerdy? Maybe. I prefer to think of it as "tuned in." As the day wears on, I'll eventually get the downy and flicker right in my yard, but it would be cool to get them all here at the overlook, about 3/4 mile from my house. SEVEN WOODPECKERS IN ONE WALK.

 I stand for 15 minutes watching, through binoculars, a dot that is a black cow lying in a still,  seemingly morose heap on a distant hillside--one I really can't reach from my high hilltop perch. I know she must have a calf to be lying down like that. By angling around I finally spot a little black bundle with a snow-white forehead lying behind her. That's the calf. You'll never see white like that on an adult cow unless they've just been shampooed for the county fair. But the freshly laundered whites of calves are unmistakable. The tiny calf is motionless, lying on its side. 

My worst self immediately leaps to the small rock of possibility that the calf was stillborn, and, my mental state being what it is, and being a writer after all, I cook up a tragic scenario. The bereaved mother might have cleaned her calf's little body and, with nothing more to do, lay down next to it to grieve. My better self argues No! it’s only sleeping, you ninny! The business of being born is hard work. I keep watching, and listening for woodpeckers. Finally, after I’ve counted all the woodpeckers there are to count, (stuck at 5) and walked back and forth along the fenceline, shifting my gaze from side to side, looking for any movement, the calf raises its  head, revealing an orange plastic tag in its left ear. Not only is it alive, but the farmer has already met it, pierced its ear, proclaimed his ownership. The calf is not dead. The cow is not morose. There is no mission for me here. I can now get on with my life, and my springtime walk. 

The mother cow no longer looks sad to me; she is Easter itself. All that, from the waggle of a little calf’s head. 

I’m a fixer, for better or worse, a helper. As I paced back and forth at the overlook, I was already sketching out a plan of action to see if I could help the calf. Why can’t I just look and not touch? I pondered this as I hiked the rest of my loop, the hike that kept me sane while my kids were babies, the hike that still sets me right in the morning. 

As I drew close to the house, already thinking about the mile long to-do list I was about to tackle, I saw a little figure on the porch. I recognized it as the same American goldfinch I had spotted last evening, huddled on the back patio near the sliding door. Last night, I had crept up to open the patio door from inside, hoping to capture it, only for it to fly away, weakly.  If they can get away, they don't need you yet.

Now, here it was on my front doorstep, and it was breathing so hard I knew it was actively dying. Over the course of the winter I’ve seen six such goldfinches in my yard. This was the seventh. I’d been able to catch two, and both died within hours of being taken in for treatment—wasted to skin and feathers and bone. I don’t know what they had—I was guessing salmonella—but the antibiotics I’d tried hadn't worked. There was no eye swelling that might have indicated Mycoplasma, the awful house finch disease that had me nursing 30 goldfinches back to health last winter. So I'd never tried Tylan on them.

Here we go again, I thought. You’ve come to both doors, as plain as pleading for help. What is it that makes a bird do that? Is it knowing where to come? Figuring that the human who lives in the house and puts out the seed every morning might know what to do? I think back to last spring, when not one but two blinded goldfinches fluttered down to the patio on different mornings while I was having breakfast there. They landed right in front of me and Curtis, seemingly waiting for us to take them in. We did. They lived to fly again, after three weeks of rest, abundant food, and the antibiotic Tylan. 

I made a little video of the goldfinch so you can see what sad shape it was in. If you can see a bird breathing, it is in extremis. There is a video going around on the Internet of a hummingbird asleep and "snoring." Isn't that cute? To someone who knows birds, an audibly breathing bird, one whose bill is opening with each gasp, is in a heap of trouble. It's neither cute nor sweet nor charming. It's sick. So goes cute stuff on the Internet, sometimes.

I've perfected a move I call The Gentle Cobra. Here it is in action. Very slow, soft, and silent, until the final grab. Boom. Bird is yours.

I took her right inside and gave her Tylan with a dropper. I kept her in a small plastic Critter Keeper while she was so weak she didn't need to move around. She seemed a lot better by nightfall. The next morning she was so much livelier that I fixed her up a hospital cage in the foyer.  Here she is about midday the next day, just before she went into the cage. I gave her another slug of Tylan with a dropper, and of course put it in her water dish. Tylan-laced water will be her only water source for the next three weeks. 

I still don't know for sure what she has, but it's extremely responsive to Tylan (my drug of choice for Mycoplasma). It makes me wonder if she and all the other six goldfinches that have turned up sick in my yard have had Mycoplasma, but it's just not manifesting in swollen eyes this year. If that's the case, that could be why I can't even begin to catch them until they're literally dying--because, weak as they become, they can still see to get away from me. 

That said, her right eye was slightly inflamed. I strongly suspect Mycoplasma gallinae, just presenting differently. Her miraculous recovery argues for that as well.

On this, her fourth day in treatment, she is ricocheting around the cage like a completely wild and well goldfinch. Just 17 more days of treatment, and then she gets to go back outside. By then, it'll be spring for sure.

Hope is a calf, hope is a bird. 

Tree Swallows, Nesting Naturally

 Woodpeckers do a huge favor to a lot of other birds when they chisel out their cavities. Red-headed, downy, hairy and red-bellied woodpeckers are the engineers, architects and contractors for most of the house-building. Flickers also excavate, but their slightly decurved bills are not quite as well-adapted to the task, so they'll often enlarge an existing cavity or choose a punkier dead tree to make their own. The huge cavities of pileated woodpeckers are a boon to wood ducks and great crested flycatchers.

These woodpeckers are called primary cavity nesters, meaning that they make their own holes. Great crested flycatchers and tree swallows are among the secondary cavity nesters who move in when the woodpeckers move out.

There were lots of these little blue beauties swirling around North Bend State Park, choosing the lower holes nearer the water for their nests.

Definitely the most confiding of cavity-nesting birds, tree swallows wait until the very last moment to leave, and grudgingly at that. When I'm checking nests, I'm sometimes able to lift an incubating tree swallow with my finger and count her eggs, then close the box again. You have to love a bird who stares you down and lets you do that. When I find a female bird incubating in a box, I usually let them alone until the next count, but sometimes I need a base count before the eggs hatch and have no choice but to intrude.

 It was lovely to see these birds nesting where they would naturally nest, in this Brigadoon for hole-nesters, safe from predators. Tree swallows are relatively recent colonists of southern Ohio and West Virginia, having expanded their range south quite a bit over the 30 years I've been monitoring nest boxes.

When we first moved to southeast Ohio in 1992, there was one spot in the county where we could see nesting swallows--a flooded embayment of the Ohio River. Now, they're everywhere, making new cocoa-brown and white babies like this one. In my boxes--sometimes two broods a season! And here, in these dead snags. Lovely to see.

Long may they nest at North Bend!