When one is a birder, one lives a certain sort of life. Few people are actually born birders. I was always interested in nature activities and always admired the idea of wildlife, but it wasn’t until I got to college that I became a true birder. Like werewolves, vampires, or the ubiquitous zombies that are so prevalent in today’s science fiction, one has to be bit by the birding bug.
In my case, it was an ornithology course that I took at UMass in Amherst. And, in my case, it wasn’t bird watching that had to be learned, but rather bird listening. Once I began to understand the sounds I was hearing out in the woods and meadows around me, the birding seed found fertile ground and put down roots. Today, those gossamer filaments seem to run throughout my entire being.
Merry Cushing, a lifelong friend and fellow birder, recently sent me a wonderful analysis of how birders spend their time. If you’d like to see this funny look at birders, just head over to my website and visit the “Great Links” section of my “Readers Corner” page. I find it very interesting that this pie chart suggests that birders spend more time listening for birds than they actually spend looking at them. I’ve always thought this was true, but now I have someone else to back me up.
This explains why I spend so much time at the beginning of every month (and especially at the beginning of spring) sitting quietly and listening. My ears strain for any sound, familiar or strange. Those familiar songs and calls suggest that everything is okay, but the strange sounds are the ones that suggest something especially interesting might be happening. And sometimes, the only way you can determine the presence of a bird is to hear it.
Such is the case with the bird of the week, the northern flicker (Colaptes auratus). I would estimate that 80 percent of my observations of this particular bird are based on sound alone. This is because flickers, unlike some smaller birds, can really belt out a loud call that echoes out over the landscape. For me, the calls of northern flickers evoke a sense of wildness and wilderness that is very powerful. If I hear a flicker calling from far down in the southern woods, I feel that all is well.
The problem with birdcalls is that they can be diabolically difficult to describe with words. Fortunately, we have technology that can sidestep this challenge and pipe the sounds directly into your ears. So, if you have a computer, go to the “Readers Corner” page of my website and click the link to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s northern flicker page. Listen for yourself and you may feel the birding seed being planted in your brain.
Hearing birds is great, but the ultimate goal of any birder is to actually see the bird in question. Americans spend enormous amounts of time, energy and money in an effort to see birds, and I know that I am always particularly pleased when I can manage to see a bird through the lens of my camera, while capturing its image. Hearing a bird can tell you where it is, but seeing a bird can tell you a great deal more about how it spends its life.
So let’s see if I can condense everything you ever wanted to know about the northern flicker into 600 words or so.
First off, the northern flicker is a species of woodpecker. As such, it has a particular set of physical traits that are very important for its lifestyle. Chief among these is the stout, sharp bill that is used for excavating nest cavities and searching for insects in rotting wood.
Something that sets flickers apart from some of the other woodpeckers in our area is the fact that flickers also forage on the ground. They are particularly fond of ants, but I imagine that they will eat just about anything that they find while they are foraging. I remember one morning when I was going out to get the paper and I saw a singularly odd-looking robin poking through the leaves on my lawn. A closer look revealed that this “robin” was actually a flicker.
Woodpeckers spend a great deal of their time clinging to tree trunks, and they have evolved another physical trait that helps them with this activity. If you look at the tail feathers of woodpeckers, you will see that they have pronounced shafts that taper off to well-defined points. The feather shafts give the feathers a reinforced stiffness that allows the birds to use them for leverage, or even for resting on. The tapered points allow the feathers to avoid being excessively damaged.
An interesting historical note on the northern flicker is the fact that it was once known — at least in our part of the country — as the yellow-shafted flicker. One might struggle to understand this name, but it again focuses on the shafts of the bird’s tail and wing feathers. On the west coast of North America, there is a bird that used to be called a red-shafted flicker, and in the heartland, where the two varieties meet, there is an orange-shafted flicker. This ease of interbreeding between the two birds prompted taxonomists to declare them all members of the same species. And thus, the northern flicker was born.
I spend a lot of time and effort setting up bird feeders in hopes of attracting just the right bird at just the right time. I also spend a lot of time and effort sitting and waiting for birds to come to those feeders, or going out into my yard and actively seeking out and stalking them. The two photos that I share with you this week are examples of great successes from each of those two birding strategies.
The first photo, with the white sky, shows an adult male northern flicker clinging to the side of one of the feeders on my porch. I’ve set up this particular feeder so that it is about 12 feet from my window, which puts it just beyond the minimum focus distance for my big 400mm lens. This means that little birds like goldfinches will fill a large portion of the frame, but a larger bird like a flicker will actually be too close. That didn’t stop me from snapping a photo that shows the exquisite coloration of the breast feathers, as well as a hint of that telltale yellow in the tail feathers.
The second photo was taken on a very different kind of day. I was standing out in my driveway and slowly scanning the yard, while also paying attention to the sounds around me. There were lots of birds around, so I had to scrutinize every movement to see if it might be a bird that was especially interesting. This is how I locked on to another adult male perched in an old sumac tree. This particular flicker hadn’t made a sound.
It was a clear spring morning and the warm sun cut through the cool air to bathe the flicker in bright light. He was a little fluffed up to insulate himself from the chill in the air, but he had a squint of contentment on his face that gave me the impression that he was relaxed and quite comfortable. It wasn’t until after I looked at this photo a little closer that I noticed his beak was covered with mud. This flicker had been on the ground, poking through the thawed-out soil for delicious invertebrates.
The April showers are finally falling, but there will be sunny days to enjoy as well. Step outside, close your eyes, and listen to the world around you. You may end up hearing the call of a northern flicker, and if you follow your ears, you may actually get to see it. At the same time you may discover that you are suddenly a birder.
Welcome to the club!
Bill Danielson has worked as a naturalist for 16 years. In that time, he has been a national park ranger, a wildlife biologist and a field researcher. He currently works as a high school chemistry and biology teacher. To contact Bill, or to learn more about his writing, visit: www.speakingofnature.com.