Hairy Woodpecker

For Throwback Thursday, here's a Hairy Woodpecker I met a little over 5 years ago. This woodpecker is easy to confuse with its smaller but more common cousin, the Downy Woodpecker. A little like crows/ravens, you'd easily tell them apart if you saw them together; by weight the Hairys are over twice as big as the Downys. Fortunately while Hairys have approximately the size of beak you'd expect in a woodpecker, the Downys have a much shorter beak in proportion to the rest of their body. Most of the time I'm pretty confident in IDing these 2 birds if I get a good look.

Although they're both relatively small by our standards, their bigger size and longer beak made the Hairy more suitable for pecking at tough tree trunks while Downys smaller size is better for foraging on smaller branches. They've both adapted to slightly different ecological roles.

The Hairy Woodpecker also interacts with other woodpeckers in different ways:

  • They'll sometimes follow Pileated Woodpeckers, letting their much larger cousins do the heavy lifting of boring a hole into a tree. Then once the Pileated has moved on, the Hairy will move in and see if there was any food their big cousin missed.
  • They're also willing to drink sap from the holes in a tree made by their closer (in size and in taxonomy) cousins, the Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers. I suspect they could make similar holes themselves (and maybe they do on rare occasions). But it's possible that the sapsuckers have a better sense of how to get sap from a tree. And (like their following of the Pileated Woodpecker), why expend the energy to peck holes yourself if somebody else will do it for you?

April 29, 2018 at Lord Stirling Park
Photo 18259805, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Northern Watersnake

Image
This April I went to Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge with the hope (among other hopes) of seeing the Northern Watersnakes during mating season. There were 2 problems with this: I think it was slightly late in the season for this. The boardwalk trail where I had seen them in the past was partially closed due to repairs. So although I didn't see any of the 2+ intertwined snakes that I'd seen in the past, but there were still Northern Watersnakes warming themselves in the sun: April 13, 2023 at Great Swamp Photo 272117862, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC) And here's another one coming out of the water. April 13, 2023 at Great Swamp Photo 272119139, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)
Read more

Female Brown-headed Cowbird

Image
Like quite a few birds, this bird is easier to identify when spotted with her significant other ; she's a Brown-headed Cowbird . Due to their tendency to be monogamous plus plain old birds-of-a-feather behavior, I usually see them with prominently brown-headed males around, greatly improving my confidence in IDing them. My understanding is that Brown-headed Cowbirds are the only obligate brood parasites in my area. Obligate brood parasites have essentially lost all their parenting skills, and thus if they were ever unable to fool other birds into raising their young, they would (almost certainly) go extinct [1]. There are, however, other brood parasites in New Jersey. These are called facultative brood parasites, and these birds will usually raise their own offspring, but will also engage in brood parasitism. (Exactly when birds perform facultative brood parasitism seems variable; one source said it occurred when resources were scarce while another said it occurred when resource
Read more

Rooftop Turkey Vultures

Image
I met these Turkey Vultures by just walking out of my apartment. (I theoretically could have gotten a picture without going outside, but that extra layer of glass can degrade picture quality a little.) Although they don't show up on these rooftops daily, they're not an uncommon visitor to my apartment complex. Similar to this spot of the woods , I wouldn't expect this to be a great place to find carcasses. I'm thinking they're here mostly because: They don't have to worry much about predators up there. They get a pretty good view of the area in case something should happen to succumb. (This apartment was near the top of a hill, providing a better view than most of the other apartments.) Since this picture was from February, it's probably a slightly warmer spot, especially near those furnace vent pipes. Although these are Turkey Vultures, it's also not unusual to see Black Vultures up there too. February 28, 2023 at Finderne Photo 264703396, (c) jpviole
Read more