Our Window on Nature

Acorn woodpeckers leave very little to chance. Pessimists by nature, these birds devote their waking hours to storing insects and acorns from late summer through fall, making sure that they’ll have ample food for the coming winter.

In much of California and the Southwest, you can’t help seeing or hearing acorn woodpeckers. They’re common wherever you find a mixture of oaks, junipers, and pines. You won’t have to look hard for them either, because they’ll be sharing your backyard or campground. These birds rank among the noisiest of the woodpecker tribe, and their loud “jacka, jacka, jacka” announces their presence long before you spot the clownlike pattern of their facial feathers. More than most birds, they seem to take pleasure in the sound of their own voices.

Of course, they have a lot to discuss. Whereas typical woodpeckers move about in pairs, acorn woodpeckers live in groups of six to a dozen or more. It takes a lot of hemming and hawing, screeching and cawing to live, work, and raise young in close quarters.

As one might expect, such communal living produces distinctive behavior patterns. The most noticeable - and perhaps the most interesting - of these behaviors is the acorn woodpecker’s habit of storing food in communal granaries.

All North American species of woodpeckers are woodworkers, but none approaches the efforts that acorn woodpeckers make to build and stock their community larder. Find a dead snag in acorn woodpecker country, and it’s apt to be so riddled with holes that it looks like a sponge. (Read the rest …)

In winter we find more birds’ nests than at any other season. It’s not that we aren’t looking the rest of the year; it’s just that the leaves get in the way. But after autumn comes and goes, the bare limbs of trees are decorated by the deserted homes of our avian friends.

An expert can identify a species of bird by its nest, for each robin and wren follows its own species’ master plan. But not all birds construct an actual nest.

The simplest nest we’ve found was that of a killdeer in North Carolina. We drove into an overflow parking lot and noticed the bird standing surprisingly close to our motorhome. As we got out and walked closer, the killdeer put on the “broken wing” display typical of the species. She tried her best to draw us away from what we now knew must be a nesting site, but there was nothing in the area but golf-ball-sized gravel covering the field.

A careful search turned up the nest - a slight depression in the gravel, filled with four eggs that perfectly matched their surroundings. We drove around the “nest” on our way out, hoping that the eggs would soon hatch. It was nearly summer, and time for that parking lot to get heavy use. (Read the rest …)