Birds
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Outdoor Hour Challenge: Pileated Woodpeckers
Back in mid-April, my daughters and I stumbled upon a pileated woodpecker nest on one of our walks in the woods. We noticed not one, but two adult birds on a dead tree. The female flew away; the male went inside.
When we went past the spot in subsequent weeks, it seemed like nothing was going on there. But more recently it has become apparent that it was — and is — an active nest after all.
This is the female woodpecker, nearly as large as a crow, preparing to feed. The youngsters are a male (with the red sideburns), and a female (with black sideburns).
The male adult has more red overall — a red crest that reaches all the way down his forehead, and red sideburns.
I’ve posted some pictures of feeding here, and of a nest exchange here.The girls and I compiled a list of the most interesting things we’ve learned about pileateds:
- Their tongues coil all the way around their skulls and are long, sharp spears with backward-facing barbs that can be extended and retracted.
- Zygodactylus feet — two toes face forward, two face backward. (A fun new word to pull out from time to time!)
- The nestlings’ solid waste is in small packets that the parent birds carry away. (I witnessed this one morning after a feeding.)
- They are “forest engineers,” excavating cavities that other birds and mammals use for their homes.
- Their call sounds like the wilderness. One of their nicknames among the early settlers was “the laughing woodpecker,” and they do have an wild-sounding laugh — it makes me think of Bertha Rochester in the attic (Jane Eyre).
- A normal clutch is four eggs.
- The parents feed by regurgitating from their crops directly into the eager beaks of their young.
- The male ends up doing the majority of the incubating.
- They have sleeping cavities in trees, and often these holes have escape routes.
- One of their main foods is carpenter ants.
Though my reflex is to think of them as wilderness birds, they have adapted quite well to human “landscape engineering.” I know of three pairs nearby, so I guess this provides some anecdotal evidence. They’re often compared to ivory-billed woodpeckers, which have fared very differently and are now, probably, extinct.
8-year-old's drawing 
11-year-old's drawing Our favorite resources, in addition to observation, have been this website and several books, of which this one has been the most complete.
I remember hearing a pileated woodpecker while riding my bike a year ago, and working hard to get my first picture of one. It was far away and a little blurry, but I was completely thrilled. I never would have guessed the sights we had in store for us this year. If the trees had been fully leafed-out, we probably wouldn’t have seen this pair that day in April. And though the young make quite a racket begging for food when their parents are near, we might chalk the strange sound up to something else if we didn’t know the source. It’s been a good reminder for us to keep an open mind and alert senses in the woods.
Feeding can be a hazardous occupation... I’m submitting this post to the Outdoor Hour Challenge, a great round-up of nature-study postings each month.
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Back yard peace, front yard violence
A few mornings ago, I sat in the back yard and enjoyed sights like these.
The rose-breasted grosbeak has a habit of singing quietly while he eats at the feeder. There were lots of other birds, and the continual scratch of squirrel claws on bark as the gray squirrels chased one another among the walnut branches. As a purely aesthetic experience, everything seemed very peaceful.
But out front, it was a different story, more revelatory of the underlying peril in all things natural. When I went inside, my youngest greeted me seriously with the announcement that she’d heard “two kerfuffles” involving wing-flapping just outside. When we went to the window to look at the robin’s nest in the shrub just beneath, there was only one nestling left.
By the end of the day, it looked, like this.
Previously it had looked, through the window, like this.
And then like this.
Crows robbed the nest.
I’m reading a book by a wildlife rehabilitator, and in one scene a Cooper’s hawk nabs a newly-released young blue jay she had raised from a nestling. It’s devastating, yet she can’t blame the hawk for needing to eat. “Whose side are you on?” her husband asks her.
“I’m on everyone’s side,” she replies.
I wish I could be that magnanimous. I know crows are incredibly smart. I respect them and respect their need to eat and recognize the irrelevance to them of the human moral code. But anyone who has ever seen nestlings holds that sight in mind as the archetype of utter defenselessness and fragility. They were a week old.
We took the nest out of the bush just in case the robins might try a second clutch in the same location. It’s not a good spot — too exposed. We feared that from the start, and had been careful not to go near the nest or otherwise draw attention to it. Predators are the most attentive nature observers.
It’s also more of a front-row seat than I want to have again any time soon.
The life of the birds, especially of our migratory songbirds, is a series of adventures and of hairbreadth escapes by flood and field. Very few of them probably die a natural death, or even live out half their appointed days… They lead the darkest kind of pioneer life, even in our gardens and orchards, and under the walls of our houses. Not a day or a night passes, from the time the eggs are laid till the young are flown, when the chances are not greatly in favor of the nest being rifled and its contents devoured — by owls, skunks, minks, and coons at night, and by crows, jays, squirrels, weasels, snakes, and rats during the day. Infancy, we say, is hedged about by many perils; but the infancy of birds is cradled and pillowed in peril. (John Burroughs, “The Tragedies of the Nests”)
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Cornell Hawks: Preparing for Takeoff
We’ve visited the red-tailed hawks at Cornell a couple of times. Yesterday, we saw them again, and I couldn’t help but wonder if it would be our last time. The hawklets may be flying before we get back!
They’re large enough to see easily from the ground now. We got there in the late afternoon, and over the hour or so that we were there, we saw two of them; the third, we saw on the nest cam, was resting out of our sight.
It was a hot one, and they were panting. (So were we!)
Ezra was on a nearby light pole, keeping an eye on things. Initially we didn’t see Big Red, but after a few minutes we saw her on the nest with the chicks. I’m not sure whether she flew in while our eyes were elsewhere, or whether she just changed position so we could see her better. In any case, she had a mission in mind that involved a short flight.
“Someday I’m gonna fly like Mom!” Obviously I was photographing this in a window through the trees. She flew over Older Daughter and me, and into a small tree about 40 feet from where my husband and Younger Daughter sat on the steps of the building across the street! There she proceeded to rip some home improvements from the tree while a chorus of small birds scolded from the neighboring branches.
Hidden picture exercise: Find that raptor! She flew back to the nest with her hard-won beakfull of bark. It was hazy, and the light doesn’t bring out her color as much as I’d like, but she is so amazing in flight — beautifully marked and powerful.
Back at the nest, she deposited the bark and headed off across the neighboring athletic field. She perches farther away than Ezra, who has picked a lightpost on the same field as the nest both times we’ve visited recently. She spent her time eating something atop the pole, circling a little, and landing on a neighboring pole.
Do red-tails wipe their beaks? This is after she finished eating. 
Walking to the other end… Meantime, back at the nest, one of the hawklets practiced flapping.
“Can we help you with something?” 
Head bump (or assist) 
Ezra had taken off shortly after we arrived, and we saw him getting mobbed across the field.
He must have held his own, because he arrived back at a lightpost near the nest.
“You with the camera again??” We were about ready to leave, but we waited a few minutes more just in case Red flew back across to the nest. Instead, Ezra launched from his post, and she followed a few moments later. They circled together and went out of sight.
We decided to take their cue and head out ourselves. We’d seen what we came to see. The most incredible experience was seeing Red in that tree, so close, yet so intent on her bark-ripping!
I wrote about our other two hawk visits here (at my other blog) and here.
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Pileated Woodpecker Feeding
I watched the pileated woodpeckers feeding their young yesterday morning. The sun was just peeking over the horizon, and I was still rustling around in dry leaves trying to find a good spot to settle, when the female showed up.
The youngsters made an incredible racket declaring their ravenous appetites, sounding like a combination of rasping hinge and buzzing insect. When she left, they continued calling for food.
The male came next, regurgitating directly into their beaks with his own formidable tweezers. (He came quickly, before I had time to move so that twig wasn’t in the way…)
How does he dare thrust in, open-eyed, among those stabbing beaks?
Unlike the female, when he finished the feeding he pushed the young back inside.
Normal clutch size is four eggs, but I’ve seen only these two young woodpeckers. Maybe there were only two successful eggs. Or maybe a predator has gotten the other two — a snake or an owl, either of which could reach into the cavity. It’s not a possibility I like to think about.
What an amazing experience to get to see the feeding! A year ago I never would have dreamed of it — I would have heard the occasional pileated call and felt a thrill, but the idea of seeing this kind of activity close in wouldn’t even have occurred to me.
The only disappointment is the graininess of my pictures in the low-light conditions. Maybe I will get another try some sunny blue day, when the sun is higher in the sky. But it’s hard to imagine two such opportunities… and the time is getting short. These young’uns seem like they must be close to fledging.
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New-to-me warbler
Yesterday morning, I heard what I was sure was a yellow warbler out back in the brush. It turned out not to be a yellow warbler at all — a fact I discovered as I waded through shoulder-high phlox and bushes in my running clothes and bedroom slippers, scanning the trees.
It was this handsome little fellow.
He was impossibly small and impossibly loud — singing his head off.
I heard the garage door go up — the signal that my husband was leaving for work — and crashed back out of the brush to find him standing in the driveway, waiting for me. “Did you see it?” he asked.
“It’s not a yellow warbler!” I said excitedly.
“That right there?” he asked, nodding toward the earsplitting birdsong. I thrust out my camera and showed him.
“Sure enough! What kind is it? Girls, new bird!” he called up to the open dining room window where both girls huddled, waiting to wave goodbye. “Mommy ‘shot’ him!” He understands the fascination with tracking down mystery birds. Last week he spent part of his lunch hour searching bushes near the parking lot where he works until he found that the source of the sonar-like song he was hearing was a prairie warbler.
Back inside, I looked the bird up and learned that he’s a chestnut-sided warbler. (My 11-year-old knew the minute she looked at my picture what kind of warbler it was. That’s what comes of poring over field guides for pleasure!)
I wish my photos were less grainy, but even grainy he’s a remarkable sight — another reminder that the more you look, the more you see.
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Walk at the Pond
The sun was out yesterday morning, and I urged the girls on in their schoolwork, dangling the carrot of a walk in the sun. They rose to the challenge, and we headed off in good time.
First to sound the alarm was this guy: “Humans! Humans!”
Apparently he was ignored, because just beyond him we saw a couple of green herons.
This one looked pretty typical... 
...till the wind blew and gave it a punk makeover. There was a whole cavalcade of geese camped out on the berm across the pond. They made an impressive racket as they took off. We could almost feel the wind from their beating wings.
There were some other water birds around too.
There were several great blue herons there — 4 or 5. They may be feeding young at the heronry down the river.
The bracken was particularly lush…
And there were some wildflowers around. Learning the names is helping me to feel more like I belong in this place.
Forget-me-nots 
Blue flags 
Bramble (I think) 
Mystery flower Back at the car, the oriole that usually hangs out in Old Man Willow was humming his way through lunch. I thought that the Burgess Bird Book named the oriole “Glory,” but it’s actually “Goldie.” I prefer Glory. It doesn’t get any more glorious than this colorful bird with his agreeable warble.
Glory the Oriole 
By then the sun was retreating behind a bank of clouds, so the flash of fire from Mr. Oriole was all the more welcome.
When we got home, Younger Daughter requested tree swallow coloring pages. Older Daughter requested a library book on caring for injured robins (for reasons I’ll share in a later post). I’ve been slacking on official nature journal pages, but I think we should probably get back into them. They’re not necessary for learning, I don’t think, and only sometimes are they an aid to seeing. But they do document the experiences of our various walks together. Someday I want the girls to have them to look back through. Once they learn the name of a flower or the habits of a bird, they will remember. But the particular treasures of particular walks may fade or get mixed up over time.
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Carolina wren
TEA-kettle TEA-kettle TEA! TEA-kettle TEA-kettle TEA!!
Pause. Shake out feathers and puff up round like a pom-pom. Hop into the air, do a 180, and prepare to send your boisterous call out over the landscape in the other direction.
He’s no bigger than a golf ball, but inside he’s the ruler of all he surveys.This little bird is a great favorite in our family. He and his mate have a nest somewhere in the brushy area over our back bank. He and his family will help us out by consuming lots and lots of insects that might otherwise consume lots and lots of our garden.
Apparently these wrens nest in some unusual places! — line-drying overalls, laundry rooms, old boots, planters. Ours are more conservative and just nest in the bushes. It always strikes me as a paradox to see him singing so loudly, telling the world where his territory is, in this season of secrecy for birds who keep their nests hidden away.
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Beaks!
Just after I expressed my wish to see little beaks at some point at the pileated nest, I did!
My husband and kids and I were taking my parents for a walk along the trail, and Mrs. P appeared.
She was there for a few minutes, then left. Mr P appeared then and went inside — briefly.
I’ve read that clutch size is typically 4 eggs, though it can vary. It’s likely that there are more youngsters in there.
I also read that adults have yellow eyes. This is true of the male, but the female’s eyes look pretty dark. But I’ll reserve judgment unless and until I get some better pictures.
This site is helpful on pileated woodpeckers.
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Pileated Pair
Yesterday I crouched in ferny woods for 45 minutes or so, waiting for the pileated woodpeckers to show themselves. It was 6:30 in the morning when I settled myself on a damp fallen log in the tick-infested woods, within view of the nest, but not too close.
I watched red-winged blackbirds chasing one another and sounding off. A broad-winged hawk lit on a branch over my head and gave me one brief, piercing look before taking flight to escape some marauding grackels. By 7:00 I was getting chilled, my feet were falling asleep, and my trick neck was threatening to jam as I looked up wistfully at the woodpecker cavity.
Suddenly, Mrs. Pileated appeared, a silhouette against the sky on a neighboring tree. She pecked away quietly, making sure the coast was clear, then whooshed to the tree and went inside.
She wasn’t in there long before Mr. Pileated appeared. He surveyed the scene carefully from several different trees, including one right in front of me.
Then he made his move.
I left, being careful to use a different route than the one I took coming in.
It was thrilling. I think of pileated woodpeckers as belonging to the wilderness, and I felt privileged to see them going through their routines together. I still haven’t seen any little beaks poking out. How many nestlings do they have? When will they fledge? I don’t want to hound them by coming too often, but I hope I’ll see a glimpse of the youngsters at some point. I’ve never seen a juvenile pileated woodpecker.
What is it that drives me to such an activity early on a Saturday morning? I’ve been thinking about it today. My woodland explorations have come to seem like some of the most real moments of my life. It’s the ultimate “unplugged” experience, for one thing. The sights and sounds and smells are all vivid and direct. For another, there is no pretense in nature. All around me are creatures busy at the task of survival. They need food; they need to mate and raise young; they need to stake out territory to provide for themselves. It’s life and death for them, and it exposes many of my human rituals and “concerns” as simply trivial. Which brings us to humility. It’s humbling to get these glimpses of the complexity and variety and beauty of the non-human world. Humbling, and deeply inspiring.
What better way could there be to start a weekend?
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Sparrows
Sparrows are so “common” — little brown birds hopping in the periphery almost everywhere. But last year, it was this little chipping sparrow, who would come to the feeder and throw his head back in song, that jolted me into paying attention to birds.
It’s so beautifully colored and marked, and so busy and sociable. Anna Botsford Comstock is quite emphatic in the Handbook of Nature Study about its helpfulness to humans by consuming garden pests, but even without such “utility” it’s appealing.Since then I’ve begun to distinguish different kinds of sparrows, and there is an amazing variety. Back in the winter, I noticed tree sparrows for the first time. They’re very similar in appearance to the chipping sparrows, but they stay all winter — the season so nearly bereft of color when it’s overcast, as it was when I snapped this.
One of the first birds to break the winter silence was the song sparrow. Now that I’m aware of it, I hear it everywhere.
I love the wholeheartedness — head thrown back, belting it out into the morning. Thornton Burgess names him “Little Friend.”
White-throated sparrows, which I’ve always associated with the Adirondacks, stayed here for a few weeks on their way back northward. Till this year I heard but never saw one. Their song is very high and sweet and lonesome, and I would have pictured a more diminutive bird. I think they’re beautiful with that dash of yellow and those crisp stripes. How could I have missed them before this year?
Just a few days ago, I saw another one that’s new to me: a white-crowned sparrow.
There are also English sparrows, seen everywhere from parking lots to barns to other birds’ nests. I don’t have a photo of one. And there are others that I haven’t seen yet that I have heard or can expect to see — swamp, vesper, and field sparrows, for instance.So many varieties of “common.” I’m reminded of the passage in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance where the writing teacher encourages a girl to break through writer’s block not by choosing a larger subject, but a smaller, more narrowly focused one:
He’d been having trouble with students who had nothing to say. At first he thought it was laziness but later it became apparent that it wasn’t. They just couldn’t think of anything to say.
One of them, a girl with strong-lensed glasses, wanted to write a 500-word essay about the United States. He was used to the sinking feeling that comes from statements like this, and suggested without disparagement that she narrow it down to just Bozeman.
When the paper came due she didn’t have it and was quite upset. She had tried and tried but she just couldn’t think of anything to say…
It just stumped him. Now he couldn’t think of anything to say. A silence occurred, and then a peculiar answer: “Narrow it down to the main street of Bozeman.” It was a stroke of insight.
She nodded dutifully and went out. But just before her next class she came back in real distress, tears this time, distress that had obviously been there for a long time. She still couldn’t think of anything to say, and couldn’t understand why, if she couldn’t think of anything about all of Bozeman, she should be able to think of something about just one street.
He was furious. “You’re not looking!” he said. A memory came back of his own dismissal from the University for having too much to say. For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses. The more you look the more you see. She really wasn’t looking and yet somehow didn’t understand this.
He told her angrily, “Narrow it down to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand brick.”
Her eyes, behind the thick-lensed glasses, opened wide.
She came in the next class with a puzzled look and handed him a five-thousand-word essay on the front of the Opera House on the main street of Bozeman, Montana. “I sat in the hamburger stand across the street,” she said, “and started writing about the first brick, and the second brick, and then by the third brick it all started to come and I couldn’t stop…”
“Nature” is a large subject. But to narrow the focus is to find that it’s even larger, more intricate, more extravagant. You could probably write well over 5,000 words about sparrows alone.
