Part 37

When the young were eighteen days old during a watch of four and one-half hours twenty-five meals were given to five nestlings that wore distinguished marks. Three of these are positively known to have received five meals apiece, and two received four apiece. * * * At this age the young Flickers every hour partake of food to the amount of one-sixteenth of their own weight, or in one day consume their full weight of food.

She says that flickers are very solicitous to keep a clean nest; for the first nine or ten days the parents eat the excrements, but after that the dejecta are carried out in the tough white sacks in which they are enclosed. If no sacks of excrement are found in the nest after feeding, the parent solicits them; “this is done by biting the heel joints sometimes, but more often the fleshy protuberance that bears that budding promise of the tail.”

She says that the male “staid with the young every night until they were three weeks old, brooding all of them until nearly two weeks of age, when they began pressing their breasts against the side of the nest, and he could cover the tails of two or three only, after which for two or three nights he sat upon the bottom of the nest apart from the young; then for four nights he hung upon the wall of the nest near the hole; thereafter he staid with them no more.”

Her records show that the young remained in the nest nearly or quite four weeks, or from 25 to 28 days. During the last three or four days nearly all of them lost weight; this may have been due to the period of the heaviest feather growth, or because the parents may have let up on the feeding to induce the young to leave the nest. Miss Sherman’s statements, as to the period of incubation and the length of time that the young remain in the nest, are quite at variance with statements made by others, but her observations were so carefully and thoroughly made under such favorable circumstances that they are more convincing than less accurate observations of others.

Some others have also described the method of feeding the young by regurgitation in a manner that differs from that observed by Miss Sherman. Mr. Brewster (1936), for example, says:

Standing on the edge of the hole, the parent would select one--usually the nearest, I thought--and bending down would drive his bill to its base into the gaping mouth which instantly closed tightly around it, when the head and bill of the parent was worked up and down with great rapidity for from one to one and one-half seconds (timed with a stop watch), the young meanwhile holding on desperately and apparently never once losing its grasp, although its poor little head was jerked up and down violently. The first, or entering downward thrust of the parent’s bill looked like a vicious stab, the bird apparently striking with all its force and as if with the design of piercing his offspring to the vitals. The subsequent up and down motion was invariably rapid and regular and resembled the bill movement of a woodpecker while “drumming.” It also suggested the stroke of a piston.

In this case the top of the stump had been broken off, leaving the nest open and exposed, so that every motion could be clearly seen from a distance of not over 15 feet. After the young had left the nest, he discovered that “the nest was left in a terribly foul state, the bottom being a disgusting mass of muddy excrement alive with wriggling worms. * * * These young, however, managed to keep very clean and all, so far as I could discover, were perfectly free from vermin.” Apparently the old birds find it difficult to clean the nest after the young reach a certain size.

W. I. Lyon (1922) tells an interesting story of a screech owl that adopted and brooded a family of young flickers, after its own nest in the same tree had been broken up twice; the owl even brought in part of a small bird, perhaps intending to feed it to the young flickers, which were all the time being fed by their parents and were successfully raised.

_Plumages._--Miss Sherman (1910) gives a very good description of the naked and blind nestling, as follows: “The pellucid color of the newly hatched Flicker resembles that of freshly sun-burned human skin, but so translucent is the nestling’s skin that immediately after a feeding one can see the line of ants that stretches down the bird’s throat and remains in view two or three minutes before passing onward. This may be witnessed for several days while the skin assumes a coarser red, until it begins to thicken and become a bluish hue, before the appearance of the pin-feathers. These may be detected under the skin on the fifth day at the same time that bristle-like projections about one-sixteenth of an inch long announce the coming of the rectrices and remiges.”

Mr. Burns (1900) says: “It is not known when the white membranous process which extends from either side of the base of the lower mandible disappears, but it probably goes at a very early age. This formation is apparently peculiar to all young woodpeckers, as suggested by Frank A. Bates, in the _Ornithologist and Oologist_, Vol. XVI, p. 35, but its use is unknown.” A photograph, published by E. H. Forbush (1927), shows that this does not wholly disappear until the young bird is nearly fledged; its function is probably to help guide the regurgitated food from the mouth of the adult into the throat of the young bird during the feeding method noted by Miss Sherman (1910).

The young flicker is fully fledged in its juvenal plumage when it leaves the nest; and, contrary to the rule among birds, this plumage more nearly resembles the plumage of the adult male than that of the old female, as the young of both sexes have the black malar patches. The black bands on the upper parts are much broader, the vinaceous portions of the head and neck are more tinged with gray, the malar patches are duller black, and the lower parts are paler with duller and larger black spots than in the adult. The crown is usually more or less suffused with dull red, especially in young males, and sometimes the red nuchal crescent is somewhat wider or more extensive; the crescent on the breast is usually smaller; the yellow on the under sides of the wings and tail is duller and more greenish; the black tips in the tail are duller and not so sharply defined against the yellow; and the upper tail coverts are black with white spots, instead of being white and boldly barred with black, as in the adult. The plumage is soft and loose in texture and the bill is small and weak.

This plumage is worn but a short time, as a complete molt begins in July and is usually finished in September or October, producing a first winter plumage that is practically adult. Adults have a complete postnuptial molt at about the same time of year. A detailed account of the progress of the molt of young birds is given by William Palmer (1901) and one of the adults by Burns (1900); both accounts are too long to be quoted here. Fall adults in fresh plumage are very handsome birds, more deeply and richly colored than spring birds; the upper parts are deeper brown and the lower parts are suffused with yellowish buff; wear and fading produce a more contrasted plumage in the spring in which the dark markings are less obscured and the soft suffusion has disappeared.

The interesting and extensive hybridizing with the red-shafted flicker will be discussed under the latter species.

_Food._--The flicker is more terrestrial in its feeding habits than any of our other woodpeckers. It is a common sight to see one of them hopping about on a lawn, or in an open place in the woods and fields, probing in the ground for ants or picking up ground insects or fallen berries. It is one of our most useful birds, worthy of the fullest protection. Professor Beal (1911) has shown that 60.92 percent of its food consists of animal matter and 39.08 percent of vegetable matter. About 75 percent of the animal food, or 45 percent of the entire food, consists of ants. The flicker eats more ants than any other bird; ants were found in 524 of the 684 stomachs examined, and 98 stomachs contained no other food; one stomach contained over 5,000 ants, and two others held over 3,000 each. If it had no other beneficial habit, the flicker would deserve protection for the good it does in keeping in check these injurious and annoying insects. Ants protect plant lice of various species, which may become very injurious to many kinds of cultivated plants, inflicting serious losses for the agricultural interests; the plant lice, or aphids, secrete a sweet honey-dew juice, of which the ants are very fond; consequently these tiny insects are herded by the ants and milked like cows. The ants take good care of their honey-producing “cattle,” driving them away from ladybugs and other enemies, leading them to new pastures, if the old ones dry up, sheltering the aphid eggs in their nests, and carrying the young aphids out onto the plants to feed. Mr. Forbush (1927) also says: “Ants riddle posts set in the ground or any timber or lumber resting upon or in contact with the ground. They destroy the sills of buildings set close to the ground and often ruin living trees, especially such as have a few dead roots. They infest lawns and buildings, destroying grass on the lawns and food in the house, and are difficult to eradicate. They sometimes eat alive the young of certain ground-nesting birds. They are very prolific and require a severe check on their numbers. Otherwise they would become unbearable pests.”

The flicker explores the ground, often scratching away leaves or rubbish, to locate the ant nests, digs into the nest with its long bill, and, as the ants come pouring out, it laps them up in quantities or inserts its long, sticky tongue deep down into the nest to get the young and eggs. Early in spring it digs into the large mounds of the mound-building ants, while the ants are less active, or tears open some rotten stump to uncover a nest. Only a few days ago, I dug into an old apple-tree stump for some rotten wood to put on some of my wildflowers and uncovered a large nest of ants; within a very few minutes my pair of flickers were on the job cleaning up the ants and their pupae.

Other insect food of the flicker includes a variety of beetles, wasps, grasshoppers, crickets, mole crickets, chinch bugs, wood lice, caterpillars, grubs, and various flying insects, which it sometimes catches on the wing, darting after them like a flycatcher (Burns, 1900).

According to Beal (1911), 39.08 percent of its food is vegetable matter. Most of this consists of wild fruits and berries, such as the berries of the dogwood (_Cornus_) and Virginia creeper, hackberries, blueberries, huckleberries, pokeberries, serviceberries (_Amelanchier_), elderberries, barberries, mulberries, blackberries, wild grapes, wild black cherries, choke cherries, cultivated cherries, and the berries of the black alder, sour gum, black gum, greenbrier (_Smilax_), spicebush (_Benzoin_), red cedar, hawthorn, mountain ash, and woodbine. Harold H. Bailey (1913) says that while the fall migration is at its height in Virginia, about October first, “they are particularly fond of the blue berry of the black-gum tree, and after once finding a tree with fruit, will continue to come to it until every berry is gone, even though continually shot at. I remember a case a few years back, when a local gunner killed fifty-seven flickers from one black-gum tree in one forenoon. After the gumberries are gone, they take to the dogwood berry for their main article of food, a fine red berry and always plentiful in Tidewater.”

The flicker feeds freely on the seeds of the poison ivy and poison sumac and perhaps does some harm in distributing the seeds of these noxious plants. Professor Beal (1895) also includes the seeds of other sumacs, clover, grasses, pigweed, mullein, ragweed, and other unidentified seeds, and the seeds of the magnolia and knotweed. Mr. Burns (1900) adds wild strawberries, dewberries, raspberries, and wild plums, also acorns, beechnuts, corn from shocks, and oats, wheat, and rye from stacks.

The birds that Miss Sherman (1910) watched in their nesting box ate considerable sawdust. “That at one time the male ate three tablespoonfuls is deemed a modest estimate. An attempt to measure the amount both ate by a fresh supply daily showed the consumption of three or more handfuls. The sawdust came from sugar maple, white and red oak wood.” She seemed to think that flickers have “little use for water,” having seen them drink only twice, during many hours of watching from a blind, “all of which taken together would amount to weeks.” Owen Durfee speaks in his notes of having seen three flickers drinking, or eating, snow on a cold day in winter; he saw one drop down onto a patch of snow on a stone wall and begin eating the snow. “His motions were just like a chicken drinking water--the partly closed bill was dipped into the snow and then held up in the air and the mandibles worked as though chewing or dissolving it, when another dip would be made. Soon two other flickers flew down in the same manner and secured some snow water. On approaching, I found the footprints and several little round holes somewhat smaller than a pencil.”

I have often seen them drinking water and so have other observers; perhaps they drink copiously but not often.

Francis H. Allen says in his notes: “I have seen one feeding in the manner of a chickadee among the twigs of a tree, perching crosswise of the twig and flitting about actively, gleaning some minute food. Mr. Brewster told me that he had seen a flicker feeding this way.”

Joseph J. Hickey tells me that he has seen a flicker feeding after the manner of an Arctic three-toed woodpecker, deliberately scaling off the bark in search for food; this bird had denuded about half the bark of a hemlock.

_Behavior._--In ordinary short flights, the flicker proclaims its relationship to the other woodpeckers by its rhythmic bounding flight, the wings beating more rapidly on the rises and much less so on the dips, which are usually followed by a short sail on motionless wings. Mr. Burns (1900) noted that the dips occur about every 15 or 20 feet and that the bird drops about 3 feet on each dip. On more prolonged flights the flight is steadier, more direct, strong, and fairly swift. It does not ordinarily fly at any great height, except when migrating. When alighting on a tree trunk, there is a graceful upward glide, the trunk is grasped with the feet, and the tail is used as a prop in true woodpecker fashion; but the flicker is more apt to alight on a horizontal branch than other woodpeckers, when there is less upward glide and an upright posture is assumed, as balance is acquired.

On the ground, the flicker proceeds slowly by short hops, but sometimes it runs rapidly for a few steps and then stops; it seems content to confine its foraging to a rather limited area and does not appear very active.

Spring drumming on a resonant limb, or inside a nesting cavity, is an essential part of the call to courtship or mating, and perhaps a signal call for other purposes; but it is used at other times, perhaps for sheer amusement. This habit sometimes becomes a nuisance, since the bird has discovered that the tin roof of a house serves as the best kind of a drum; here he comes morning after morning while we are enjoying our slumbers, from which we are rudely awakened at an unseemly hour. Mr. DuBois writes to me that, on an afternoon in June, “a flicker was drumming on the lid of a large galvanized iron ash or garbage can at the corner of the back porch of a residence; he stood on the top of the lid and, at intervals, after looking around, he beat an extremely rapid roll on this metallic drum; the effect was startling.”

As to the roosting habits of flickers, Miss Sherman (1910) writes: “Of all our birds the flickers are the earliest to retire at night, sometimes going to their lodgings an hour before sundown, the customary time being about a half hour before sunset. Generally they go out soon after sunrise, but on cool autumn mornings they have been known to linger much longer. During a rainstorm in the middle of the day they have been seen to seek their apartments, also in fine weather they have been found there enjoying the seclusion thus afforded.”

Frank R. Smith, of Hyattsville, Md., sends me the following note, dated February 28, 1936: “For some nights, a flicker has been roosting in the shell of a dead tree, from which one side has decayed away, leaving a troughlike section of its trunk standing. He roosts about 12 feet from the ground. This morning it was cloudy and he left the roosting place at 7:25, although official sunrise is at 6:37.” Mr. Shelley tells me that he flushed a male from the nest tree, “where he clung each night about 3 feet above the nest hole, with the female brooding the young within.” Flickers will roost in any open cavity in a tree, or even in a partially sheltered spot on the open trunk; they often drill holes in barns or under the eaves of houses for winter roosts; a favorite winter roosting place is in the sawdust between the double walls of icehouses. Sometimes they dig a hole into a vacant building and fail to find their way out; I once found one dead inside the garage at my summer cottage, which had been closed all winter. Mr. Forbush (1927) says that “during one winter at Wareham one apparently slept on the wall of my summer cottage under the eaves, clinging to one of the ornamental battens in an upright position as it would cling to a tree trunk. This bird for some unaccountable reason chose the north side of the cottage. He was there night after night at dusk and also at daylight each morning. Mr. K. F. Carr tells of a flicker that was accustomed to pass winter nights in a chimney of an unoccupied dwelling in a thickly settled neighborhood which undoubtedly was a more comfortable roosting place than the north side of my cottage.”

Dr. Lynds Jones told Mr. Burns (1900) that “at Oberlin College a single bird roosted between the vertical water pipe and wall of Spear Library for two successive winters, and another occupied the cupola of the Theological Seminary the succeeding winter.”

Flickers are generally regarded as peaceful harmless birds, but the following two quotations indicate that they are sometimes otherwise.

O. P. Allert (1934) writes from Giard, Iowa: “On June 4, 1933, while in the yard of my home, I was attracted by the cries of a pair of Robins and saw a female Flicker in the act of killing the two young that the Robins’ nest contained. One was killed in the nest, and the other either fell or was thrown to the ground, where the Flicker followed and dispatched it.”

Dr. Dayton Stoner (1932) writes: “While the flicker is not habitually belligerent, it does on occasion show some aggressiveness. This most frequently occurs during the breeding season. For example, on July 11, 1929, in the Parker woods south of Lakeport, I came upon several flickers and two or three crows that were tormenting a red-shouldered hawk. The flickers were pecking excitedly on the limbs of the tree on which the hawk perched, and clamoring loudly at it. When the hawk flew off the flickers darted after it, pecking it unmercifully until it lit again, when they were cautious about approaching close to the harassed hawk. This quarrel was continued for more than half an hour.”

_Voice._--The flicker has an elaborate vocabulary; no other woodpecker, and few other birds, can produce a greater variety of loud striking calls and soft conversational notes. A number of its many vernacular names are based on a fancied resemblance to some one of its notes, and in most cases these names give a very fair idea of the note. A few of such names are “flicker,” “yucker,” “wacup,” “hit-tock,” “yarrup,” “clape,” and “piute”; and there are other modifications of these in different combinations of letters.

The commonest and most characteristic note is the loud spring call, of which Eugene P. Bicknell (1885) says: “Its long rolling call may be taken as especially representative of song, and is a characteristic sound of the empty woodland of early spring. It is usually given from some high perch, and has a free, far-reaching quality, that gives it the effect of a signal thrown out over the barren country, as if to arouse sleeping nature. This call continues irregularly through the summer, but then loses much of its prominence amid the multitude of bird voices. It is not infrequent in September, but later than the middle of October I have not heard it.”

This is a sharp, penetrating note, which can be heard at a long distance; the syllables _wick, wick, wick, wick_, or _yuck, yuck, yuck, yuck_, are very rapidly uttered and repeated in long series. Dr. Elon H. Eaton (1914) says that “it may be heard for more than half a mile and has been variously syllabized, usually written as ‘_cuh-cuh-cuh-cuh_’,” which hardly represents my idea of the song.

A softer note, heard during active courtship and display, sounds like _wake-up, wake-up, wake-up_, or _yarrup, yarrup, yarrup_, given more deliberately in subdued tones and not so prolonged. This has been referred to as the scythe-sharpening, or rollicking, song and has also been written as _yucker, yucker, yucker_, or _wicker, wicker, wicker_, or _hick-up, hick-up, hick-up_, or _flicker, flicker, flicker_. Mr. Bicknell (1885) has recorded these notes from April 8 to September 5; there seems to be no seasonal regularity about them, as they are probably affectionate notes of greeting. Mr. Burns (1900) “heard an apparently rare variation, a metallic _Ka-wick-wick-wick-wick-wick-wick-wick-wick-wick-wick-ka_ by the male while close to the nest.”

He gives as conversational, or soliloquizing notes, “commonly a scanny, gurgling, almost involuntary _chur-r-r-r_ as danger seems to threaten it when on the wing, or when flushed from the ground or just before a-lighting, which may be interpreted as a note of warning or announcement of arrival according to the circumstances. I have heard a low guttural _who-del_ as it endeavored to balance itself on a slender branch immediately after arrival.” A bird on a house roof, in December, “uttered an odd guttural call of _huck-a-woó-ah_ or again only _woo woo_ evidently for his own edification.” Other soft conversational notes sound like _ouit-ouit_, or _puir-puir_, or a cooing _yu-cah-yu-cah_.

Dr. Eaton (1914) says: “When the flicker flies up from the ground and alights on a stub or fence post, he frequently bobs and bows to an imaginary audience and immediately thereafter jerks his head high upward giving voice to a sharp note like the syllable ‘clape.’” This is a loud, explosive note and may indicate defiance or surprise.