Conversation with a Sapsucker

Natural History, November 2016

 

 

One summer, I literally ran across a woodpecker while out running. The bird popped up at my feet—fluttering and floundering—trying to get out of my way but unable to fly. There was obviously something wrong with it. As I picked it up to examine, it screamed loudly in protest. It was fully feathered and its garb fit that of a juvenile yellow-bellied sapsucker (Sphyrapicus varius). I couldn’t distinguish its sex, because the red on the throat of males of this species—found even in juvenile garb—is acquired somewhat later. I found no sign of a broken wing bone or any other injury. Its keel was sharp, however, indicating that its flight muscles were atrophied. No parents were around and, likely, it had not been fed for days.

The bird’s condition did not entirely surprise me. In early spring this year, the weather had been promising enough for birds to start their usual full clutches, but then there had been days of gushing rain and cold, which negatively affect insect populations. Before the rains came, there had been bumblebees (all queens), so by now I had expected an abundance of offspring—worker bees swarming over blooming fireweed, meadowsweet, milkweed, dogbane, and American chestnut trees. But instead I rarely saw even one. Bumblebees are conspicuous. Other insects, which I notice less often, must have also been affected. In any case, a link in the food chain had been broken, which would impact the birds: not all the young get fed in times of poor weather. This bird, although it had been fed enough to fledge, had then lost the strength to fly. It was doomed to starve if left where it was.

As I held it in my hands, it fluffed out its head feathers and vented vociferously. I waited for its parents to come to its cries. None came, and I had to make a decision. I could leave the bird and trot on, certain of its fate, or I could intervene. I subscribe to the principle that one should not “mess with nature,” but reality dictated a compromise. We eat, drive cars, clear land, and build homes that disrupt entire ecosystems. Each of us necessarily has a huge impact on innumerable species. Why not help a member of another species in direct need when I had the opportunity? My act of stumbling upon the bird made the decision unavoidable. But to take this sapsucker home meant finding the proper food and a place to house it, and having the time and patience to care for it. As I held it there on the road, I could not assume anything, except the bird’s impossible odds, which dictated that I could do no wrong by trying and failing. And so I took off my T-shirt and wrapped the bird in it. I still had a mile or so to run to my turn-around point, so I put the package down to pick it up on the way back, and continued, meanwhile hoping for an epiphany about how to nurse and what to feed the baby bird.

 

None had materialized by the time I came back, nor had the parents of this woodpecker. It was still rolled up in my shirt, and I picked it up and ran the rest of the way home. The bird squirmed now and then, but otherwise it was calm throughout the run. At home, I put it in a wooden box with screen windows that I had previously used to house caterpillars.

The sapsucker seemed calm in the box. No more struggles, no more screams. I thought I even heard a churr sound. I happened to have some fresh raw meat handy. Protein is protein. I held a small piece in long forceps alongside its bill. After only brief hesitation, the sapsucker took it off the forceps, swallowed, and made a couple cheep sounds in the process, and then started taking one piece of meat after another. An hour later, it again expressed hunger by churring. After a few more feedings, I started announcing my arrivals with my own peep, peep, peep sound.

Before the day was out, this sapsucker juvenile made a churring noise merely when I came to the box and opened the cover. It had learned to associate my arrival and the sound of the box opening with food delivery.

The next day, the sapsucker hopped up to the edge of the box and took meat directly from my fingers. I realized, though, that if we had been outdoors, the situation would have been very different. Years ago, when I was studying ravens, which are so wild in Maine that they fly away at the sight of a human, I was surprised to see them feed from my hand after capture. However, after equipping them with radio transmitters, wing tags, or leg bands and releasing them, they only moments later behaved exactly as they had before capture; context is everything.

 

By the second day, the sapsucker fed at fairly regular two-hour intervals. It was recovering rapidly, faster than I realized. After one feeding of several pieces of steak, it suddenly flew off the box and out the door, which had been left open. I thought my rescue experiment was not yet over because the bird was not able to fly well enough to cope in the wild. Accipiter hawks specialize in catching young birds. It seemed doomed after all. However, hours later I heard churring in the grass in our field. The bird had generated enough power to gain distance but not enough to attain altitude. I knew it had not run out of fuel—hit the wall, or the bonk, in marathon runners’ terms—because it had been feeding steadily earlier in the day. I had witnessed bird-bonking the previous winter when a downy woodpecker arrived at our feeder so weak that it could barely fly. After refueling on suet taken from my fingers after I had grabbed it, it revived and flew off. That was not the case with this young sapsucker; it had not yet regained its flight muscles. I recaptured it with a butterfly net and brought it back to the box. This time, as I held it in my hands, it neither struggled nor screamed and eagerly resumed taking meat from my fingers.

The changed behavior made me wonder if the bird “knew” I had rescued it—not necessarily in a conscious way, of course—but it may have felt the contrast from its days of starving to being regularly fed, and it may have associated the new with what made the difference. Such apparent appreciation of riches has been seen in the response of dogs and cats that have been rescued. Animals accept the status quo, almost whatever it is. But they respond to a change, even a small one, from what they were used to.

 

After another day of devouring hefty portions of meat, the sapsucker again flew out the door. This time it gained enough height to disappear into the foliage of maple trees in the nearby woods. Although it had gained much strength, its flight was still clumsy. It had returned to the woods of bird song, squirrel chatter, and tree frog calls, but its chances of survival still seemed slight.

Just before dark that day I made my peep, peep, peep calls at the edge of the woods. I had no idea where the bird was, or even if it was still near. Almost instantly, it replied with its own churr call from in the woods. I quickly procured gobbets of meat and replied with more peep, peep, peep calls—the code for both food and “I am here.” The sapsucker then flew from the woods and landed on the branch of a maple tree a meter above my head. It hopped down the tree trunk to pluck the piece of meat from my fingers, and then hopped back up and settled under a thick limb. It was still there later that night when I got up and checked with a flashlight. The next morning I found it still there at 4:30 a.m. A half-hour later, it landed on our cabin wall, making its usual call announcing its presence, signaling to me that it wanted food. I went out and complied.

Our conversations became routine. A week into our relationship, the sapsucker again landed on the cabin wall below my window and announced its arrival. I went out, and it now landed on my hand. When I lifted it to my face, the bird plucked food from between my teeth. In spite of this close contact, I was confident there was no danger of it becoming dependent on me because it had constant access to the wild. And indeed, the woodpecker was already visiting us less and less frequently.

The next day, I spotted a sapsucker in juvenile plumage at an ant trail on the trunk of the large birch tree next to the cabin. It was picking off ants in the same manner, seemingly, as the adults I had routinely watched there. To test if it was my sapsucker, so to speak, I gave my peep, peep, peep. The answer was clear, though rather feeble, a barely audible churr. And then it paid no attention to me. I was still skeptical that it could be my bird because I had never before had a sapsucker give a response like that. When I sidled up to it at the tree trunk—with my head within a meter—rather than fly off, it made one more faint churr and then left; there was no more doubt what bird it was.

After that encounter, the sapsucker continued to visit occasionally but showed no interest in anything I offered nor in approaching me. It had no more need of me, and had perhaps found food that it preferred over steak. It acted as though it had forgotten me, or else it had switched to its adult behavior.

 

It had been a week of conversation with a sapsucker, but then it ended, as if by the flip of a switch. I had communicated with a wild woodpecker. I learned at least two of its signals, a vocabulary of two words. Their meaning varied with context and with intensity and repetition. The first, the churr, was a one-syllable call of an upward, inflected high pitch that trailed downward. The bird gave it when it came to the cabin to be fed. Given the context, it translates to “feed me” but also to “I am here.” At first daylight every morning when I went out and called, the sapsucker replied with a single churr from wherever it was in the nearby woods, but it did not necessarily come. I had heard this call for years and had never given it a thought. The churr call was not just a juvenile begging, because the sapsucker did not always come after it had told me where it was (a parent might have gone to it). Furthermore, the churr was not just a reply to my peep, peep, peep. The bird used it as a summons or solicitation, one it gave after it had come to the cabin spontaneously without my calling it, usually after landing on the door or by a window.

The sapsucker’s cheeping vocalization was almost continuous while it was being fed—the same sound one hears from a nest hole with hungry chicks, where the volume increases greatly when a parent arrives. Since the birds are already aware a parent or feeder is near and about to deliver the food, why cheep at all and why make it louder? I suspect it is a signal of hunger to the adult, but it may also serve to “cheer on” the adult for bringing the food. Increased volume of the cheep may signal a greater hunger and give the loudest nestling a competitive edge over its siblings to end up receiving more of the incoming food.

The sapsucker is now independent. It could have continued to take the food I provided, but it chose not to. A switch had occurred as though by a decision. Forgetting could have been part of it, a useful if not adaptive trait. Brain space is not unlimited. A woodpecker needs to be efficient; it must get everything right in life in a couple of weeks, not years. It needs to have major adaptive traits ready for immediate functioning. The bird’s change in behavior toward me seemed like the usual parting of ways with parents. Rationally, I was glad for it, but emotionally, I missed the relationship. A woodpecker is not a social animal, but we humans are. We bond to what we become close to, in this case the young sapsucker, but we also bond to our surroundings—the nature this bird represented.

 

Yellow-bellied sapsucker at his sap-lick made in a birch tree, along with others taking advantage of it.