Red-headed wood carver

On the trail going down to Elk Falls this afternoon, every passing visitor stopped, pointed, held up their cell phones or cameras (me, too), hung around chatting.  Here's what held us up:

As I first saw it.

Woodpecker holes! And huge ones! I took photos of this, then passed the tree, looked back. And there was the carver, hard at work on the far side. She wasn't paying any attention to us, even when we were a fair-sized crowd. Chips were flying, big chunks of bark and tan wood. The ground under the tree was covered.

Pileated woodpecker, Drycopus pileatus, female. 

Males have a red "moustache" and the red topknot continues on to the forehead. This one's a female.

I watched for a while. She kept hammering away and tossing chips over her shoulder. Every few chips, she would pick up something and eat it: ants or beetle larvae, probably. Back to work. She would pull her head 'way back, pause for a second, then drive in; wham! And another big chip would fly off.

After a while, I went on down the trail. When it started to rain, I turned back. When I passed her again, she was still pounding at the tree and had moved up into fresh wood. Another group of people were watching her; she ignored them.

The tree is alive. I'll be watching it now. Will it come down in the next windstorm? Or will it turn into a dead woodpecker snag, suitable for nesting?

I took a video; I'll process it tomorrow.

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Esta tarde, en el camino que baja hasta las cataratas Elk, cada visitante se detenía en un punto, apuntaba, levantaba su celular o su cámara (yo también), y se quedaba allí, platicando con los otros transeúntes. Esto es lo que nos detuvo:

1. Un árbol, medio destrozado. Así es como lo vi al llegar. Excavaciones hechos por un pájaro carpintero. Excavaciones muy grandes. Saqué fotos, y seguí adelante. Cuando había pasado el árbol, miré el lado opuesto, y allí estaba la escultora. No parecía notar nuestra presencia, ni aun cuando se había detenido un buen grupo de gente. Volaban trozos grandes de madera y de corteza; alrededor de la base del árbol el suelo estaba cubierto.
2. El pájaro carpintero pileado (o cresta roja), Dryocopus pileatus.
3. Es hembra: los machos tienen un bigote rojo, y la cresta roja se extiende hasta la frente.

Me quedé observándola por un tiempecito. Ella seguía golpeando el tronco y aventando pedazos de madera. Después de algunos golpes, recogería algo y se lo comía; serían hormigas o tal vez larvas de escarabajos. Y volvía al trabajo. Alzaba la cabeza, estirándose para alejarse del tronco, y luego martillaba. Un golpe bastante fuerte. Y otro trozo grande de madera saltaba al aire.

Después de un rato, seguí por el camino, cerro abajo. Cuando empezó a llover, regresé. Al pasar otra vez por su árbol, ella todavía excavaba el tronco. Otro grupo de personas la miraban; ella no les hacía caso ninguno.

El árbol vive. De ahora en adelante, voy a volver a observarlo al pasar. ¿En la próxima tormenta, vendrá abajo? ¿O se mantendrá como un árbol muerto, útil para los nidos de pájaros y otros animales?

Tengo un video; mañana lo voy a procesar.

Downy

I spent a couple of hours watching birds in a friend's backyard today. It's a favourite bird hangout, full of berry-laden bushes, fruit trees and sunflowers, bird baths and a tray of peanuts. There were hummingbirds, a flicker, varied thrush, assorted LBBs, juncos and towhees and robins and starlings; and a woodpecker who stayed put on our side of the tree long enough to get photos!

A downy woodpecker, female. The males have a red spot on the head.

These are tiny woodpeckers, about 6.5 inches long, slightly bigger than a chickadee.

Not many of my photos turned out, what with the distance (any time we stepped out onto the lawn, the birds flew away), the grey day, and a kit lens. No matter: it was a wonderful afternoon! I'll have a few more photos processed by tomorrow.

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Pasé un par de horas hoy en el jardín de una amiga, mirando los pájaros. Tiene un sitio ideal, lleno de árboles frutales, arbustos con una variedad de frutillas, girasoles, baños para pájaros, y una charola con cacahuates. Y había colibrís, un pájaro carpintero Colaptes, unos zorzales (Ixoreus naevius), una variedad de pequeños gorriones, juncos, rascadores moteados, petirrojos, una bandada de estorninos; y además, ¡un pájarito carpintero velloso menor, que no se nos escondió como es costumbre, pero se quedó en nuestro lado de un tronco por varios minutos!

Fotos: la pajarita; es hembra; los machos tienen un gorro rojo. Son pájaros chicos, apenas 16 cm. de largo.

Pocas de mis fotos salieron, por la distancia, pues cada que salimos de nuestro escondite, todos los pájaros se iban. Y porque el dia era gris, y yo solo tengo la lente básica. Pero fue un dia lindo, con todo y todo. Mañana subiré algunas fotos más.

Vintage bird

 Woodpecker. A woody woodpecker. Really woody.

With mushrooms and a grass stem.

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Un pájaro carpintero. O así parece. Nacido de la raiz de una rama.

Half-seen birds

... at Kitty Coleman Park.

Cawing crow, mostly in silhouette. On a hemlock branch.

Happy harlequins, on a calm sea.

And in the forest, a woodpecker pounded away on a tree, over and over, pausing between each sequence; to dig out a grub? Listen for fleeing grubs? Wait for his brain to stop ringing? Not long, anyhow. I heard him, walked down the trail until I located the tree, and stood squinting against the light, trying to see the bird. Impossible. Until he decided to switch trees, and I caught a glimpse of his shadow as he disappeared behind a fat old Douglas fir.

Using her head

We've been working too hard. In the last couple of days, I've been pruning rhododendrons and rose bushes, cutting down volunteer Oregon grapes, and raking, raking, raking . . . Laurie went out and bought more soil, and several pots of ferns, then cut down a tree. Our backs are protesting.

Someone else has been busy in the garden, taking care of an old cherry tree.

See:

It's a big job, but someone's gotta do it.

Going deeper.

The tree was badly pruned about 5 years ago (butchered, I think, is the correct word). It has sprouted new branches, but the heartwood is rotting out, and it's probably full of bugs.

The woodpecker has come back twice; she's almost down to the heartwood now. There's a small hill of punk wood and sawdust at the foot of the tree.

State of affairs this afternoon.

Does she ever get a headache?

*Post updated to correct her gender. Males have a red moustache, females don't.  I realized this, thanks to Steve Creek, who has a photo of a male feeding his chick.

Birding Boundary Park

Just down the hill from us, there is a little park that we somehow have forgotten to visit. We remedied that this week.

Boundary Park, so called, I think, because it's on the boundary between Surrey and Delta, is a rather tame place, at first glance. A tiny lake, almost circular, well fenced, with a paved pathway all around it. The lawn is mowed, the weeds kept in check. A place to take the kids with their tricycles, or to sit on a bench and watch ducks. We walked quickly; the walkway lies in full sun, and this was a hot afternoon.

But beyond the lake, the park slopes upward, into a meandering green space between housing developments, heavily treed, partly wild, partly tamed. Here we wandered, dodging spider webs, appreciating the shade.

And everywhere, there were birds:

Crow on a rock

Mallards on a rock

Ducks without rocks

Rock without birds

Near this rock under the evergreens, we saw a pileated woodpecker. It wound around and around the trunk of a cottonwood, always disappearing just as the camera focused. I got one very bad, very small photo.

I don't think I've seen one of these around here before.

And there was a seriously endangered star-winged jay:

A backyard bird, very tame.

And not so tame:

Young heron frogging by the lake. Not very happy with us.

More park photos tomorrow.

Oh, the frustration!

We parked the car in a little lane just off Crescent Beach. While Laurie got his beach boots on (and I'd forgotten mine, again; will I ever learn?), I walked on ahead, looking for budding leaves.

A woman was standing in the lane, craning her neck. In the tall, half-dead trees far overhead, something was making an awful racket; repeated machine-gun drumrolls a few seconds apart. A woodpecker.

We examined every branch, every tree. After a while, Laurie joined us. There was nothing there, but the drumming; no sign of a bird, it seemed. Finally, 'way up at the tip of a thin snag, a bump moved. Laurie got a tiny photo. (We must invest in a telescopic lens one of these days.) How does such a small bird, on such a tiny stick, make such a noise?

Long, sharp beak, speckled or striped breast, barely visible.

Another passerby discovered the second bird, a bit lower down, but still almost invisible. All I could see with the naked eye was a slight bump on the snag.

A brown, mottled bird, with whitish underside.

I think it's a flicker. It's hard to tell when you're looking from the bottom up.

Later, coming back to the car, we found this wren song Lincoln's sparrow* waiting for us:


It hung around, scrabbling through the duff quite tamely, for a while. We shot umpteen photos, but only in this one was it recognizable; mostly, it blended so well into the background, that the camera couldn't find it to focus. Half the time, I couldn't see it until it moved, even though it was only a few feet away.

And down on the beach, all the birds, hundreds of them, made sure they kept far away from us, and against the afternoon sun.

*After examining all the sparrows in the book, comparing it to this one, we've settled on a Lincoln's, blown off course. We could be wrong.


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Musings while in recovery

I'm too tired, after a day of babysitting, and traumatized, from almost 48 hours without an internet connection, to put together a coherent post. The best I can do is a series of wandering thoughts.

1. Because I had to reboot the computer and the modem as part of the attempt at locating the problem (which didn't help, at all; the outage was at the other end) and because the computer was useless, anyway, (Why do they put the help files online these days? When you need them for trouble-shooting, you can't get them. That's akin to the isp staff that e-mailed my dad to tell him that his e-mail was currently not available while they upgraded. Really! So helpful!) I unhooked everything, cleared and moved the desk, and sorted out the wiring. The desk had been in the same position for about 5 years.

It took all day Tuesday to do that, and to return everything to its place and hook it all up again.

It wasn't as dusty behind the desk as I would have expected. I only found one spider, which I carefully shooed into a crack before I vacuumed.

I keep an air filter running behind the computer at all times, to make sure it gets only the cleanest, most dust-free air possible. Tuesday, I vacuumed the computer thoroughly from every angle, and through every vent. Then I put a fresh, new dust bag into the vacuum, reversed the hose, and blew through the rear fan outlet. I should have done this outside; a huge cloud of fine dust spewed out of the intakes and all over the room. So I had to vacuum and dust everything in the room again.

Dust is not good for computers. Moral of the story; must clean computer much more frequently.

2. Travelling around with an almost-3-year-old, I stopped to watch a backhoe at work on a crumbling garden installation. It was picking up rotting beams, stacking them to one side, and levelling a small hill. After we started home, I was treated to the following conversation:

Sophia: "Backhoe bites wood."
Me: "Yes, a backhoe bites wood. And mud."
S: "Not people?"
Me: "No, not people. It doesn't bite people. Just wood and mud."
S: "Not Sophia?"
Me: "No, not Sophia. Just wood and mud."

And then a monologue, all the way home: "Bites wood. Bites mud. Not people. Not Sophia. Not people. Wood. Mud. Bites wood. Bites mud. Not Sophia. Not people. Bites ..."

If repeating a fact 10 times cements it in memory, I'm sure she's got this one down for life.

3. Eileen (Cicero) writes of squirrels being "ever so persistent." They are. So are kids. (Which is why you can't hide Christmas presents from them, and why (I think) some teens are such good hackers.) In the mall, we stopped to look at the loonie grabbers, the brightly-coloured bouncing "airplanes" and bunny rabbits and Noah's Arks. One, a kid-sized ice-cream truck, was still going, after the previous kid had left it. Sophia climbed in and entertained herself pushing all the buttons. ("Yum! Chocolate! My favourite!" the red one elicited.) Another kid, a boy around 5, climbed in, too.

The truck used up its loonie, and stopped. Sophia pushed buttons vainly. But the boy jiggled the coin return lever with one hand, and pushed the Start button with the other. Off they went again, for the full ride.

On the third time round, the trick failed. The kid kept trying, until his mother came over to take him off to pre-school. She told me he'd discovered the trick some weeks before. She's got a hacker in the making there.

4. The Great Backyard Bird Count. We did count, but without too much profit. Juncos, chickadees, crows, and pigeons, of course. Eagles, 10 in one small clump of trees along the Ladner Trunk Road. 4 Northern Harriers in and beside a field, a mass meeting of gulls along the highway to Richmond. Not much else.

Part of the problem was that we were on the go most of the weekend; we made observations from the car as I drove. And I took no photos. These two are from the week before:

A dozen crows. Otherwise known as a murder.


Wally's Woodpecker. This wouldn't have worked for the bird count, would it?

And Laurie did get a close shot at a hawk from the car, as I drove. Unfortunately, the car hit a bump just as he pressed the shutter:

Hawk backside. And, on the lamp, a liberal application of white hawk poop.

5. And tomorrow, I hope, life will return to its normal tempo. (I can dream, can't I?)

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Questions, questions, and a sowbug graveyard

I don't know enough about trees. With the leaves on, and a bit of help, I can usually recognize the more common ones. Without leaves, I'm struggling. It doesn't help that here in the lower mainland, the climate is so mild, and the gardeners so enthusiastic, that many of the trees around the homes and businesses are imported or hybridised. Even in the greenbelts, the newcomers are taking root. (See Huckleberry Days, for example.)

I take a photo of some bark, bring home a leaf or two, and compare them with my books. Sometimes, I find them right away, and there is no doubt about them. At others, well, is this bark like that, or like that? Or maybe like this one from China? Do the leaves match? Almost? Not at all?

This evening I got out all my tree books and leafed through them, looking for the latest find. No luck, at all.


What is this? It's a deciduous tree, not terribly big. There were no catkins nor budding leaves yet.


The other side of the same trunk. Elephant skin. Are these younger branches, coming up from below?


In a couple of spots where the bark has separated from the trunk, this red mass shows up. Is it the inner bark, or some fungus or slime?

Far too many questions.

Inside the trunk, we found a mini-habitat:

At several points around the trunk, where it seems that a branch must have broken off some time ago, there are deep holes.

The young branches have grown up around this one.

I blew my photos up to full size and took inventory. The wood at the top had a crumbly look to it; I could see worm tracks here and there. There may be a few woodpecker holes, but not many. (Compare it to Seabrooke's woodpecker tree.)

In the puddle at the bottom; dead leaves, a few twigs, some rectangular whitish things, and an earthworm (I think). Above that, in the damp; slimy green algae, looking uncannily like sea lettuce. Up at the top where it's dry; white slime (parchment, crust, dry rot?). And between the algae and the puddle; a few sowbug carcasses. They looked like spider frass; while we were at the tree, I looked for webs or spiders, but none were visible.

Another view of the same hole. See the sowbug graveyard?

Not the same hole. This one is dryer, and full of dead sowbugs. The edges of the plates are white, making the bugs look striped, possibly because of a fungal growth.

Those are the first sowbugs, dead or alive, I've seen around here since the cold weather started. Under the bark, though, no matter how it snows and blows, there is a modicum of warmth and moisture for assorted insect, worm and spider life.

On a tree a few feet away, moss and lichen grew. Different chemistry, different organisms. But there are probably sowbugs in the crevices there, too. And spiders. There are always spiders.

Leaf lichen and tiny moss.

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In praise of dead trees

How do you recognize a healthy forest? Plenty of greenery, good colour? Birdsong? Variety of plants? That fresh, wet, "green" smell?

One clue will be a fair proportion of dead material, not only the fallen leaves of last summer's growth, but needles, branches, and entire trees. Without them, the forest becomes sterile, a pretty park needing the careful hand of the gardener, bearing seeds and new plants. Leave it alone, and it will start to die, and spring into new life.

Shelf in Watershed Park, with fallen tree making a "clothesline" far overhead.

Raw materials. Branches from last year's storms.

Bushwhacking through the Watershed this week, without the summer froth of salmonberry, huckleberry, trailing blackberry, deciduous saplings, and so on, we noticed the deadwood more than we normally would. And it's bursting with life.

Storm casualty.

There were many stumps like this one, twisted and torn by windstorms, then stripped of their bark. Assorted slimes, lichen, and fungi creep over the surface, and dig into the wood. Beetles and larvae burrow through them; birds hunt for the insects.

A few of the stumps have been burnt, whether by lightning strikes or human intervention, we can't tell. The burnt places host their own special vegetation.

The ghost of the stump; a knight in armor to my eyes.

This springboard slot on an old stump has been burnt over. Now it's turning green. So is the stump itself: see the roots hanging down the side? A sapling takes advantage of the extra height (more sunlight) and the nutrients in all that rotting wood, to get a head start.

A large tree, fallen and broken off, becomes a den for larger animals, a hiding place, a dry spot on a rainy day, or a passageway.

Tunnel.

And, of course, the various fungi are always there. Sometimes they bring about the death of the tree:

Infested, top to bottom.

By the time the first of these shelf mushrooms show up on the bark, they have already taken over the woody interior. The shelves are just the fruiting bodies. These trees will stand upright for a time, rotting faster in this position than if they were on the forest floor. Meanwhile, they provide food for insects and birds, until a good windstorm topples them.

And down she went. A new crop of fan mushrooms takes over.

Once downed, as well as nutrients, they provide shelter for small, tender things:


On the lower slopes, we came across this pair of snags:

Woodpecker trees.

The bark has been stripped away, right down to the heartwood. Chips are scattered on the ground, with a pile right at the foot of the snag.

Wikipedia says of the pileated woodpecker,

"They often chip out large and roughly rectangular holes in trees while searching out insects."

A government site calls the holes "diagnostic". And Canadian Biodiversity maps them here. I haven't seen one, but I have heard them. Holes low down on the snag will be searches for food; nest holes are built much higher, in the central cavity of the tree. Last year's nests will serve as homes for many other species of birds, in their turn.

An old cedar stump, flaky as the pastry my grandmother made, "iced" with green icing, has a series of dents on one side, possibly the work of a sapsucker:

Bird barcode?

Laurie was following a small woodpecker, who, as they always are, was invariably on the far side of the tree*. I wandered off in another direction, and came across these red things on the ground:


At first, I thought they were some kind of mushroom that I hadn't seen before. Then I realized that they were scattered all around an area about 30 feet across, an area devoid of all but a few bare twigs, and dead leaves. They were lying loose; no stems, no connection to the ground. I picked up a few of the chunks.


They had the texture of rotted wood, and a whitish skin on one side. Bark?

I called Laurie, and he came over, looked straight up, and found the source:

Far above our heads.

Bleeding tree.

As far as we can tell, in the winter when there are no leaves, it's a red alder.

From BCAdventure.com;

"The name red alder comes from the fact that the inner bark turns orange-red when exposed to air."

What kind of woodpecker makes these holes, I have been unable to figure out. Do you know?

*Laurie never did get a clear view of that elusive woodpecker.

And what kind of creature left behind this piece of dead tree, I can easily guess.


It was less that two dozen steps from a litter barrel. I counted. And I filled the bag with the rest of the scattered lunch wrappings (some were foil, some plastic) before I dumped it.

Dead branches fit here in these woods; not dead painted paper. Nor foil, nor plastic. For shame!
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Very bad photos of good birds

We weren't birding, this Saturday; we had other things to do. We voted in our local elections, then headed for a bi-annual pottery sale in Tsawwassen. Afterward, we would have lunch in Beach Grove, and then, weather permitting, go for a short walk. All very organized.

The voting went quickly. But the procedure was different than usual; they gave us pages to fill out by connecting arrows, using their pens, not ours. And those pages were fed into a machine that swallowed them and left the worker with the folder only. She said it had counted our votes already. I'm not so sure I trust these contraptions.

On to the pottery sale!

Except that we got side-tracked. On the far side of a plowed field, we saw a small flock of white birds. We turned off and parked on the farm road.

Trumpeter Swans

Too far away for good photos; why don't they come this way?


Oh. They've got a windfall: plowed-up carrots. Do swans eat carrots? It seems that they do.

They honked constantly. It sounded like a 5-year-old's birthday party, with all the kids at once blowing those silly plastic horns.

On to the pottery sale!

With a slow-down to check out an eagle's nest by the highway. No eagle there now. (There was when we were heading home.) Slow-down to look at a blue heron in the ditch, another for a flock of starlings that rose in a sudden cloud when we passed. Slowdown for Laurie to get these ducks in an artificial pond. (Two years ago, it was a bare puddle; then there were weeds, now grasses. Ducks are a new development.)

The car is moving. Not the ducks.

There were no birds at the pottery sale. Not even pottery birds.

It was late, and the weather was beautiful, so we stopped at Tim Horton's for soup, bought a couple of bags of bird seed at Bosley's for my feathery family at home, and went on to the beach at Beach Grove. The tide was in, the birds were out. Way out.

Mixed rafts of waterfowl. Too far away to identify.

A pair of loons swam close to the shore at one point, teasing us by diving in unison, halving the chances we got at photographing them. (Laurie got a beautiful shot of two circles on the blue wavelets, circles where two loons* had been when he pressed the shutter.)


Caught them, just after they surfaced. Didn't wait to focus.

Later, in the distance, we heard them laughing.

On the chimney of one of the houses, a seagull posed. At least, until he saw a camera pointed in his direction. Then:

Mooning us.

Looks like he's standing on wingtips.

Back into Beach Grove for coffee and tea. On the way, this Downy teased us, hopping from the backside of one branch to the far side of the next.


Caught him, anyhow. Once, and blurred.

Time to head home. For us and these crows; they were part of a long stream (river, even) of crows going west, as usual at this time of the night. I've watched them many a time, tried to count occasionally; there must be several hundreds, maybe even thousands, wherever it is that they go home to in the evenings.


So much for not birding.

*I was wrong. They were mergansers, Seabrooke says. I should have looked more closely, rather than relying on the clue of the laughing loons.
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