Copyright 2007 by Richie Swanson
The first red-headed woodpecker I’ve encountered here since 1998 lands directly behind a second high in a granddaddy oak. Each leans horizontally along the limb, pointing its bill downriver. The first scoots low along the other’s back, and their scarlet heads wag. White-and-black wings flutter, fluff, tilt, and minutes later one red-headed taps a maple snag beneath a hole, bowing partway in. The second pokes out its head, chortling, Quirr! Quarr! Quarr! The first hitches itself excitedly up to a broader hole, and a wood duck veers deftly through treetops, landing above the snag. She peers at the red-headed as it ducks in. The big-white teardrops around her eyes look gentle and pretty, but her brood may be in the hole, and wood ducks sometimes clasp and snap intruders’ necks.
I saw my first wood ducklings out of their nest cavities this spring on Friday. They swam through white water lilies, a bald eagle plunged at them, and their mother hen splashed and flapped and zigzagged, screaming, Oo-eek! Oo-eek! The eagle rose with empty talons, scattering egrets and herons, dive-bombed by a redwing, and the hen cried on. But this hen merely settles her belly down on her branch and watches the red-headed woodpecker silently as it flies to its courtship limb again, re-joining its mate while two more red-headeds quarr from opposite directions.
Red-headed populations have declined by half since 1966, perhaps due to possible causes listed in last week’s post. They appear amid Aghaming’s oldest oaks and cottonwoods, where cerulean warblers bred from at least 1993-2000. Acorn-abundance sometimes determines the presence of red-headeds, who hammer them so tightly into storage-cracks blue jays and other animals can’t pry them out.
Least bitterns call from Osprey Marsh this morning, also from other cattails, bulrush and arrowheads just south of Prothonotary Trail. Tut-tut-tut, tut-tut-tut, tut-tut-tut. USFWS considers the species a conservation priority, rare and declining. Least bitterns lost nearly five million acres of inland-wetland habitat in North America between the mid-1950s and mid-1970s.
You can wait hours to see a Least bittern standing secretly in a dense marsh, pointing or bending its bill like a reed–or stalking, grasping plant-stalks with long toes and curved claws, using reeds as stepping stones above watery marsh-muck. The species builds the foundation of its nest with spokes of sticks, pulls down and crimps surrounding stalks, adds a roof-canopy of vegetation and pokes holes in the nest-floor that drain feces. It also builds platforms from which to spear frogs, small fish and other prey.
Another USFWS conservation priority, a state-threatened species in Wisconsin, shrieks invisibly atop the forest. KEE-AHH! KEE-AHH! KEE-AHH! As a red-shouldered hawk unleashes its screams, a great-horned owl hunches in a high-cottonwood limb, glowers, pinches its head-tufts inwardly, irritably. The red-shouldered glides a tight-haughty circle, showing glimpses of under-wings stiffly open, richly rufous, white-barred through gaps in the woods. The owl flushes. The KEE-AHHs follow.
The red-shouldered seems to shriek halfway to St. Louis, halfway to Itasca. I imagine it uses its sheer vexatious loudness to scream the species’ habitat back into being–mature floodplain forest 90% gone from the Midwest. In reality, the cries probably serve another motive. Red-shouldered young hatch here about mid-May and perch flightless in treetops during early June, and the hawk keeps the fledgling-eating owl away from them.
Now caws and carg-arg-arghs pitch harshly in treetops, eager-sounding. Six, eight, twelve crows drop through a maple crown, and a barred owl fledgling waddles on a limb, tucking a face with gray-fuzzy eye-discs and a yellow-hooked beak against the trunk. A crow dives against its downy-mottled wings. The fledgling swivels its head, blinking black-gawking eyes, and the crow-din rises, and an adult owl soars through trees, turning away from the fledgling, but no crows give chase. HOO-HOO-HOO-TO-HAW-HAW-AW-AW! The adult shouts gruffly, returning, swooping broad-winged at crows. Some crows quiet. Others vanish, and minutes later the fledgling methodically climbs the maple, still hugging the trunk, clawing its way up with its feet, and then it perches on a limb, preening its fluffy shoulders while the adult watches from a walnut-top.
Like the red-shouldered hawk, the barred owl prefers large, unbroken forests such as occur at Aghaming and throughout the Upper Miss. It finds its nest cavities in old trees and probably chooses dense forest-canopies for protection from mobbing.
Meanwhile a ruby-throated hummingbird hovers above a nest the size of a ping-pong ball cut in half, found in a narrow-dangling limb above a slough. Dull-green lichen splatters the nest, and a cottonwood seed blows from it. She zooms after it, returns, needles it inside the rim. Her tongue shoots out, looking white and sticky-looking with spider-web silk, her nest-glue. She fusses hyperactively, swiping her bill beneath the limb. She pushes her belly down, forming the cup, and since the male has the blazing throat and hers is pale, her bill blends with the skin-tight gray of the young maple branch, looking like a twig-tip.
One scientist found ruby-throat breeding may coincide with columbine blooms, but columbine has gone to seed here. Blue flag,
SOURCES
Crocoll, S.T. 1994. Red-shouldered hawk (Buteo lineatus). The Birds of North America Online, No. 107. (A. Poole, Ed.) Ithaca: Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology; Retrieved from the Birds of North America Online Database.
Gibbs, J.P., F.A. Reid, and S.M. Melvin. 1992. Least Bittern. In The Birds of North America, No. 17 (A. Poole, P. Stettenheim, and F. Gill, Eds.) Philadelphia: The Academy of Natural Sciences; Washington, D.C. The American Ornithologists’ Union.
Mazur, K.M., and P.C. James. 2000. Barred Owl (Strix varia). In The Birds of North America, No. 508 (A. Poole and F. Gill, eds.) The Birds of North America, Inc., Philadelphia PA.
Robinson, T.R., R.R. Sargent, and M.B. Sargent. 1996. Ruby-throated Hummingbird (Archilochus colubris). In The Birds of North America, No. 204. (A. Poole and F. Gill, eds.) The Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, and The American Ornithologists’ Union, Washington D.C.
Smith, K.G., J.H. Withgott, and P.G. Rodewald. 2000. Red-headed Woodpecker (Melanerpes erthytrocephalus.) In The Birds of North America, No. 518 (A. Poole and F. Gill, eds.) The Birds of North America, Inc., Philadelphia PA.
United States Fish & Wildlife Service. 2002. Fish and Wildlife Resource Conservation Priorities, Region 3. Version 2.0.
Thanks to Eric Nelson, Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife & Fish Refuge, for help identifying beggarticks.
Least bitterns are definitely neat birds.