Pileated woodpecker. Photo by Nancy Jane Kern

THIS IS THE TIME of year birds are establishing territories, finding mates, nesting, and feeding young. Our largest area woodpecker is the black and white pileated, the one that is crow-sized and has a beautiful red crest, like the cartoon “Woody” Woodpecker. They make large oblong holes, not round ones like the other woodpeckers. They are so good at chiseling wood that they may completely gut a large tree to get the insect larva inside. People get upset if these birds attack a yard tree, but it shows that the tree is unhealthy, probably dying, and full of insects. They also do this to buildings and anything else that is wooden and infested with their favorite foods.

To thwart this problem and withstand the high winds on my Austerlitz hill, I built my house with a siding that is made of concrete and fiber. Our woodworking woodpeckers have special beaks and bodies. The pileated can whack a tree at 20 times per second totaling about 12,000 whacks per day and extracts insects and larva with a tongue that extends 4” beyond the tip of the beak.

The tongue is an anatomy nightmare that loops from the jawbone, is inside the right nostril, to the top of the skull, and goes around to the beak. It is best to look at it in a diagram to even begin to comprehend this. The tip of the tongue is barbed and has a sticky substance to hold the insects. The whole woodpecker body absorbs and dissipates the shock of each blow. Scientists have been studying this to see why woodpeckers don’t get headaches and traumatic brain injuries like we humans do. Read more…

Daffodils

I WANDER’D lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o’er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

—William Wordsworth 1804

WHAT BEAUTIFUL IMAGERY for a beautiful flower. It also fits the floating dancing flight of a butterfly, and this past week I enjoyed both. The first butterfly out near the house, as usual, was the brown, buff-edged, 3” mourning cloak butterfly. If it alights for closer inspection, the row of iridescent blue dots just inside the buff edge can be seen, and the wings are actually a rich, very dark red velvet color. Only four legs are visible, but like all insects, there are actually six, with the front two legs near the head and very short and hairy. This puts them in the category of brush foot butterflies. I always feel so excited to see them and think, right or wrong, that finally, winter has gone.

The reason this butterfly can emerge and fly so early is that it hibernates through the winter as an adult. It can survive very harsh, cold winter weather, and actually requires a cold stage. They are found throughout much of North America and Eurasia, Siberia and Japan, but it does not survive in mild, damp climates such as in Great Britain.

Specimens found there are migrants and called the Camberwell beauty for the area they were first discovered near London in the 1700’s. The name mourning cloak is a literal translation for this article of clothing and comes from Scandinavian (“sorgmantel”) and German (“Trauermantel”). It is thought that these early settlers gave us this name. The official, scientific name is Nymphalis antiopa. Narcissus was the classical Greek name of a beautiful youth who became so entranced with his own reflection that he pined away and the gods turned him into a flower. People sometimes refer to certain types of daffodils as narcissus, but in general, growers refer to all types as daffodils. Read more…

Hungry hen turkey. Photo by Nancy Jane Kern

SPRING IS IN THE AIR and wild turkeys are really getting into the annual mating season. I have handsome toms looking like puffed-up ads for Thanksgiving, and demure females distant from them. There is a myth that Benjamin Franklin proposed our wild turkey as our national symbol. Eagles had bad behaviors of thievery while the turkeys were very congenial so Benjamin Franklin defended the honor of the turkey. I feel sorry for turkeys being pejorative. People say that something disappointing was a “real turkey.”

The name turkey has murky origins. In King Henry VIII’s time, turkeycock referred to exotic fowl such as peacocks, possibly because the country of Turkey had exotic exports. The wild turkey is the only Western Hemisphere bird to receive worldwide importance through domestication. As North American natives, our wild turkeys were shipped live to England, and we adopted their name turkey. Native Americans had many names for the turkey. The Blackfoot term omahksipi’kssii, literally means “big bird.”

Wild turkey feathers have been used in the traditional dress of many tribes, particularly the feathered cloaks of eastern Woodland Indians like the Wampanoag and the feather headdresses of southern tribes like the Tuscarora and Catawba. The Turkey Dance is one of the most important social dances of the Caddo tribe, associated with songs about war honors and tribal pride. Some other eastern tribes, such as the Lenape, Shawnee, and Seminoles, have turkey dances as well. You can understand this when the tom turkey dances around to impress hens with lots of footwork and a colorful presence. The book Birds of Algonquin Legend by Robert E. Nichols Jr. is an interesting book I want to read. Read more…