Hang Over Cure- The Power Of The Pileated Woodpecker

Female Pileated Woodpecker

Recently, I spent three consecutive days on Hermit Island from six forty-five to ten AM. Hermit Island is on the end of the Phippsburg peninsula. Because it juts far out into the Atlantic ocean, it is a haven for migrating birds. They don't like crossing expanses of water any more than I like getting up early. So, they congregate building their numbers for the inevitable crossing. To catch the birds as they began to move with the rising sun's heat, I had to rise at 6, which makes me absolutely nauseous. I'm not crabby when I get up, but I am logy and have to fight back the spins. This is just how it is for me; I'm accustomed to plowing my way toward wakefulness. As soon as I start moving, I'm okay and I really do love the light in the morning and the soft silence.
     Hermit Island is privately owned. It's an undeveloped campground with 275 sites. Columbus Day weekend was the last hurrah. There were many die hard campers, none of whom were awake when I arrived. As I walked the two miles of dirt road to the end of the island, I could hear breathing and snoring from the tents. Picnic tables were littered with beer bottles and cans, debris from partying. A Red squirrel toppled a few to the ground, scaring itself, then scampering away. The only other sounds were rustling leaves, and the birds, thousands of them. Chirring, chipping and whirring mingled with the scratching sounds of tiny claws on bark. As I walked, no matter how carefully I placed each step, rocks skidded and gravel crunched. By comparison, my own foot steps were clunky, until I heard the Pileated woodpeckers.
     Pileateds are noisy. They bash, hammer and tear at trees and their call rips the air. I saw five in one day, four of them near one another. I'm sure they were the Pileated family group I had written about this past spring. It was a thrill to see them all grown up and out tearing up the forest. Their raucous screeching and drumming must have been a delight for hung-over campers' headaches. When I was a child, my father was often hung over. To roust him out and torment him, my mother would bang together pots and pans and tell him she was serving him a glass full of cold pork gravey. This formula usually worked, too. He would probably have preferred a Pileated cure.

Departure Day- American Robin & Pileated Woodpeckers

Pileated woodpeckers have a long, thick tongue for licking up the insects that flee from the holes they hammer out. In the top and bottom left photos, the red cheek stripe of the male is evident.
I had speculated that the young Pileated woodpeckers were about to leave the nest and I was correct. When last I saw them, they were doing a little practice drumming on the rim of the hole, as you can see in the bottom right photo. The little girl has her tongue out on the edge to lick up any insects which may have come out after she banged on the wood. Of course, this was just practice as little to nothing lives in a chemically treated telephone pole. They were also calling a watered down version of the classic "Kee-kee-kee-kuk-kuk" and a rasping hiss which was more childlike sounding to me. Their nest cavity was on Hermit Island where all the campsites are (I can tell you that now that it is no longer a nest cavity but just an empty hole). The wee woodpeckers will stay with their parents all summer learning to find food. They will be hungry, but not efficient at finding eats. So, they will be pounding a lot more holes than the adults need to. The campers will hear them knocking with what sounds like a hammer drumming on wood all summer starting early in the morning. "Knock-knock-knock-knock! Get up!" They left the nest cavity sometime around lunchtime yesterday.

At our house, across Small Point Harbor from where that action was taking place, an American robin couple had a nest in the Baltic ivy on the side of our house by the front door. For about a month, I had been watching the parents slipping in and out of the ivy until I could identify where the nest was. One day, they picked up their pace and were energetically carrying food with them. I knew they had gone from sitting on eggs to feeding chicks. In a few days, I could hear the little rascals, too. I had expected that any day now, there would be silence because they, too would be leaving home. And sure enough! I heard this tremendous racket of alarm calling out in the yard. I grabbed the camera and went to investigate. Our dog, Perry was sitting on the lawn looking at this young robin. He had not touched it, but the parents were raising the roof yelling at him and swooping around him. He seemed quite confused and uncertain about all the noise. He is a Shiba inu. They were bred to flush birds from bushes, but I don't imagine that he would ever have been very good at that. He was curious about the little bird, but not in a 'lunch menu' sort of way. I took him into the house, then went back to watch the little one. Sure enough, he was able to fly a few feet on his own. Very much the dawdler, he took his time hopping and flying toward the garden. He disappeared and I saw his Dad reunite  with him in the woods. The nest is silent, now. I don't know if he was the only one or if the others managed to slip away undetected. That would certainly be better if they just got up in the middle of the night, packed a light suitcase leaving a note in the kitchen before disappearing.

Pileated Paradise- Woodpecker Espionage

One of my sources tipped me off to this Pileated Woodpecker nest. I went there at 7:30 this morning and as many of you know, I'm not a morning person. I'm not a grumpy person in the morning; I'm just slow to start. I am awake between 6:30 and 7, but I frequently don't get out of my bathrobe until after ten. As a gardener, photographer, and birder, this poses numerous challenges. Many of my preferred subjects have left the fields, forests and fens for the mall by the time I'm ready to engage. Also, the light is usually better in the morning for some things, like landscapes and close ups of flowers. I can assure you, too that the later it gets in the day the hotter it gets which makes gardening more rigorous than it might otherwise be. But, much as I don't love the early hours, I do love a challenge. Bring on the heat of the day, the mosquitoes, the already well fed birds and beasts and crumby lighting! I'm your girl. The reasons I went so early today were two-fold. One reason was that I had an appointment with a service person at my house and had to beat them back to my place. The other reason, I'm not terribly ashamed to admit, was because I  fully intended to trespass to get these images. Stealth would hopefully serve where discretion clearly would not. I am discreet enough that I'm not going to say where this was, but not so decent a person that I would have stayed home rather than lurk around at the crack of dawn behind someone's outbuilding. Solid espionage requires calculated risk and a low moral standard, or at least, a very skewed moral standard. Perhaps, a double moral standard, which is no moral standard at all. Did you follow that? That is going to be my argument in court, should I get caught. My plan is that it will be so confusing that the judge will demand, "Counselors, approach the bench!" Since I'll be defending myself, that will be me. The judge will be in a hopeless bind when he suggests to me  that I try a psychiatric defense. I'm going to pull wildly at my own hair and while hopping up and down bellow "Blame the woodpeckers!"

And who will be able to blame me after they see these photos, my defense exhibits? Look how cute they are! There are three of them. Pileateds usually have between three and five eggs. The chicks are developed enough, that I can see at least one of them is male. His little red cheeks are beginning to show.

I did not see the male, only this female feeding them. I learned the identification differences between males and females after my previous Pileated post where I erred about the gender. She does not have red cheeks. Neither do I, as I am without shame. Pileated woodpeckers only use the nest cavity, excavated by the male in April, for one season. Then, they abandon it. The chicks fledge about a month after hatching. I'm guessing they aren't too far from leaving. So, for me, it was now or never. Both parents raise the young. They feed them insects and especially like Carpenter ants. The bad news is that I only saw two chicks poke out of the hole for feeding. That does not bode well for the less aggressive of the bunch. Two of them will grow up to be trespassers; one will not.

 Thanks to  Wikipedia for some of the information. Some of it, I made up, honest, Your Honor.

Magnificent Acre- Bald Eagle, Lesser Yellowlegs, Eastern Pheobe, Pileated Woodpecker

 

Yesterday was a fantastic day. The weather was warm, in the high seventies, we are all healthy, including our dog, Perry, and I sold a mess of photographs. What could have been better? On my way home from delivering the photographs with a nice check burning a hole in my pocket, I stopped to check in on the Bald eagle's nest. The parents were around, but not on the nest at first. The one seen here was perched just off  to the side of the nest in the same tree. Under the nest, the grass and weeds are splattered heavily with eagle poo. It looks like a Jackson Pollock nature painting. I found a large feather stuck quill end into the poo like a javelin had been launched from on high. This eagle was panting because it was pretty hot in the sun and quite humid. I passed under the eagle's nest in pursuit of this female Pileated woodpecker. Believe it or not, I was more interested in getting a shot of her than the Bald eagle. I've taken lots of shots of perched eagles, even these same ones, enough so that I'm kind of bored with it. I need an eagle to do something interesting like fight with another bird, fly off with a sheep or perhaps my neighbor's dog. I have found getting a good image of a Pileated to be more of a challenge. First of all, there seem to be fewer of them than eagles, at least around here. Then, they are quite wary of people and fly away the second one moves. Also, being woodpeckers, they are always in places where the light is dim and there are lots of tree branches in the way. Their favorite food is Carpenter ants. Where I took this photo is a lumber mill with decades of milled wood stacked in the woods decomposing. It's a Carpenter ant factory. I have heard the loud "kuk kuk keeekeeekeekee kuk kuk" call in those woods before but never been able to get close enough, until today. This one was so busy bashing huge chunks of bark from this dead White pine that it didn't notice me. I could hear the slabs of bark falling from high up and followed the noise through the woods. So the bird wouldn't hear me, I only moved when I heard the woodpecker banging and the bark crashing to the ground. This Pileated was so vigorous about getting food in this fairly small area of trees that I think she has a nest with hatchlings nearby (of course, that's my next photography mission). My hands were trembling and my heart was pounding with each step I took advancing on her, sneaking along like Pocahontas with the feather jammed into my  pony tail. I have image stabilization on my lens, but it can only overcome so much movement. I was lucky to get good, crisp shots! I think the feather gave me good luck, carried me swiftly and surely of foot, silently through the forest. Ya. Okay. Next fantasy. After I had my fill of that,

 

The Pileated Woodpecker is our largest woodpecker at almost 17" tall. This one is female. Someone will probably jump out of the trees here to tell me that this isn't a female.

I headed back to my car. On a spit of rock sticking into the Kennebec River, I saw these three Lesser Yellowlegs. I'm going with 'Lesser' versus 'Greater' (not more) Yellowlegs because they look more delicate, with thinner necks and longer legs. I'm probably wrong about this, too. Yellowlegs, both kinds, are a migratory wading bird common here in the summer. It's breeding season so see how very yellow their legs are? Quite flashy! While I was shooting them, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. This Eastern Phoebe landed on a piece of driftwood. I had seen it a couple of times flitting around the area with insects in its bill, so I'm assuming that it is also nesting nearby. There was a pair of Song sparrows also nesting there and Black And White Warblers, too. The area of woods sits on a point of land between the Kennebec River and Winnegance Lake. There is a good sized marsh on one side. It is a magnificent acre of wildlife.

A Woodchuck popped up onto this driftwood log barely 60 feet from the Yellowlegs. It was staring me down and humming, "How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?" When one of the eagles came back to its nest, this guy dove for cover. Maybe it's a she with a litter nearby, too. That seemed to be the order of the day. It seemed quite incongruous to see a Woodchuck alongside Yellowlegs. In the left foreground of the photo, you can see dreaded Poison Ivy. I was wearing sandals because I had gone to sell photographs, not shoot wildlife. It is fortunately my practice to always look where I'm walking or I would have stepped into it along with that pile of eagle poo. I did get a Dog tick inside my shirt, too. These photographs were worth all of it.