Black-backed Woodpecker
Black-backed Woodpecker Winter in the Northwoods is a very special place and time of year. There is just something exceptional and inviting about the absolute silence, stillness, and wildness that combines to make it a great place to be alone and experience nature. The wildlife in the Northwoods is unlike any other habitat. Several interesting and unique species occur here. Sure, many of the more familiar species also occur here but it’s the Northwoods specialists that really interest me. Recently, I spent some time looking for a Northwoods specialty bird, the Black-backed Woodpecker. The Black-backed Woodpecker (Picoides arcticus) is also known as the Arctic Three-toed Woodpecker. Right now, you might be thinking to yourself, Three-toed Woodpecker is a strange name. Obviously, this bird must have only three toes. Let’s take a closer look at this and see what is interesting about this woodpecker. There are 241 species of woodpecker in the world. We have 23 species here in North America. All of these woodpeckers around the world have four toes, except for three. Yep, you got that. Of all the woodpeckers in the world, only three of them have three toes. They are the Three-toed Woodpecker (Picoides dorsalis), the Black-backed Woodpecker (Picoides arcticus), and the Eurasian Three-toed Woodpecker (Picoides tridactylus). So, two out of the three species of woodpecker in the world that have only three toes live right here in the Northwoods. One of the many amazing things about woodpeckers is their feet. In order to cling to the vertical sides of trees without falling off is the number of toes they have and how those toes are arranged. Toe arrangement in birds is critical. Most birds have four toes, with three facing forward and one backwards. For many woodpeckers, they have a unique toe arrangement. They have two toes forward and two toes back. This is called a zygodactyl foot. The extra toe facing the rear gives them more gripping strength to hold onto the tree and fight gravity. So, what’s up with the species that only have three toes? This specialized adaptation gives the bird an advantage when searching for food. The Black-backed Woodpecker specializes in feeding on the larvae of wood-boring beetles, especially in forests that have been damaged by forest fires. So, these birds move around from year to year following areas of forest that have been damaged by forest fires, which can make finding these woodpeckers challenging. The advantage of the three toes in this woodpecker allows them to lean further back and thus deliver a more powerful hammering blow to remove the tree’s bark. While they pound directly into a tree trunk like other woodpeckers, much of what the Black-backed Woodpecker does is more of a glancing blow. This sideways pecking flecks or peals, the outer bark off the tree, which exposes the larva stage of the beetles, which is the majority of their food source. The larvae range from 2 to 15 mm in length. Each one is a protein-packed package of food. While photographing the Black-backed Woodpecker over 2 days, I watched as they pulled one larva after another out from under the newly flaked bark. When they find a tree with a good amount of bark beetle larvae they usually stay on the tree for upwards of 15 or 20 minutes, moving up and down, flaking off the bark and exposing the larvae underneath. After two days of searching and photographing the Black-backed Woodpecker in the great Northwoods in winter, I was ready to warm up and get back to the office. Until next time… Stan Tekiela is an author, naturalist, and wildlife photographer who travels extensively to study and photograph wildlife. He can be followed on Instagram and Facebook. He can be contacted via his website at naturesmart.com.
Hummingbird Migration
Bird migration is still one of nature’s most interesting and yet mysterious events. On the surface, migration seems rather simple and straight-forward, but if you stop and take a detailed look, you will see every shade of complexity possible. There are over 11,000 species of birds, and about 40 percent partake in some form of migration. Migrations range from simple elevational changes for species that live in the mountains, to short, distant movements to avoid unfavorable weather, to long, distant trips to warm climates to escape winter, to the granddaddy of them all, migration from one end of the earth to the other. Right away, you can see there is more to migration than perhaps you thought. In the 1800’s we didn’t understand much about migration. We thought it was impossible for a tiny bird to navigate over great distances and endure huge physical demands, so we said it was impossible and we “made up facts” such as hummingbirds had to migrate on the backs of geese, in order for them to escape winter. We also said that some birds dove down to the bottom of ponds and overwintered in the mud for the winter. The thoughts of these kinds of theories now seem preposterous and outlandish. Yet at the time, it was accepted as fact because someone didn’t understand, so they made up something that could explain the unexplainable. In the 1900s, we started to develop new ways to study birds. Some of the earliest attempts to track migration involved catching a bird and tying a brightly colored ribbon on their wing in hopes of being able to find this bird again during winter. This wasn’t very efficient, and you had to have an idea where they stayed for the winter already to make this work. When transistors were invented in the 1940s, it was the breakthrough that made small electronics possible, and by the end of the 1900s, small tracking devices were used to track the migration of free-flying birds. This was the beginning of our better understanding of bird migration, but just the tip of the migration iceberg. In just the past few decades, so much new and almost unbelievable information about bird migration has completely turned our understanding of migration upside down. Today, there are many ways to track migrating birds. One of these migration tracking tools is a website called Bird Cast from Cornell Lab. All you need to do is put in your county and state, and each day during the migration season, you can see how many birds passed over your county on the previous night. There is a ton of information available to anyone who is curious about what is going on with migration. In addition to the tally of the birds migrating through your county, there is also information about what time they migrated, the timing of each nightly flight, along with flight direction and altitude. They also have a list of the expected species that are migrating. For example, as I write this, 97,400 birds passed over my county last night, and at one given moment last night, 36,400 birds were in flight, traveling SSW at 14 mph, at an altitude of 600 feet, all at one time. In order to gather all this data, Bird Cast uses data from the national network of weather surveillance radars (NEXRAD). Sophisticated algorithms and machine learning models are applied to the radar data to separate weather, such as precipitation, from biological signals (the birds). It then analyzes the strength of the radar signals to estimate the number of birds that are flying. Just like the weather, they are able to give migration forecasts to predict the nocturnal bird migration for the next few nights. We sure have come a long way in the understanding of bird migration, unlocking some of the most mysterious natural events of nature. However, no doubt there is so much more we don’t understand about bird migration, and we will understand more in the years to come. Until next time… Stan Tekiela is an author, naturalist, and wildlife photographer who travels extensively to study and photograph wildlife. He can be followed on Instagram and Facebook. He can be contacted via his website at naturesmart.com.