Backyard Bird Watching

Recently the woodpeckers around my house have been giving me fits. A lot of this is my own fault due to my personal gardening habits, but I can still complain, can’t I? I have woodpeckers. They fly about the woods on my property happily, eat bugs, batter away at logs and generally partake in woodpecker activities. My frequent fliers are the pileated, red bellied and a little hairy. Well none of them come to my feeders. Of course they don’t! I have left them with too much natural food. I leave dead trees that are no danger to the house standing just for them. They are wonderfully full of bugs and the woodpeckers love them. They have built homes in them, it’s beautiful. I have also taken down a couple of smaller trees and just dropped them where they are, left to rot. These are high bird activity spots, in particular the pileated brought her babies to these where they foraged daily. I have also planted a lot of native berry shrubs for bird food. I even left a big ant pile that’s out of my way for the flickers. Yuck.

So as a result, the woodpeckers are quite happy with all of this natural food and ignore the canned stuff supplied by me at the feeding stations. It’s no big deal if they don’t land on a feeder so long as they are about, right? For some reason I want them on my feeders, go figure. So what I did was to take a dead bit of log and drill some shallow holes in it, stick a hook on the top and call it a bird feeder.

Method: Take a log about 3"-4" in diameter and 12" long, and drill some randomly placed 1"-1 1/4" holes in it. Make the hole about 1/2 to 1" deep. Stick a hanging hook in the top, and there you go, a suet plug feeder.

I placed this next to my "official" suet feeder in hopes of luring woodpeckers to the suet, but no go. They are landing and feeding from the log, but still ignoring the suet feeder. Those rascals. I even have a recycled plastic plug feeder with the same food in it but again, no go, they land on the log. The food I am using is Peanut Butter Spread Bird Food, available through Wild Birds Unlimited, and they seem to love it. So do several of the smaller woodland birds.You can also make your own with this easy recipie:

1 cup peanut butter
1 cup crisco shortening or other shortening
4 cups yellow cornmeal
1 cup white flour

Just mix it well and store in the fridge. I have also cut up store bought suet cakes and smashed those into the holes, they work well. Some people smear peanut butter on tress - not me, to many bugs here and squirrels!

The log feeder is a bear to clean, they do get gunked up so I am hoping my woodpeckers adapt to the much easier to clean suet stations and I can take the log down. But if woodpeckers will not come to your feeders, yet you know they are out there, try the log. It’s a natural for them.

 The red headed woodpecker is one of my favorite birds. i used to see them often years ago, but now i have not seen one in years. When they say that a bird is on the decline I believe it. You don’t really notice things that go missing. Please help these birds.

This is from the Audubon Bird Watch List: 

Threats

At one time the Red-headed Woodpecker was targeted by sportsmen because of its brilliant red plumage, as an agricultural pest, and for damage to telephone poles. Its population has decreased as a result of food source losses, as evidenced by population declines in association with the decline of beech trees and the disappearance of Rocky Mountain grasshoppers. Collisions with automobiles were particularly common in the mid-1900s and the species is considered a rare victim of tower collisions. Nest failure occurs when nests are excavated in telephone poles recently (within 3-4 years) treated with creosote. Competition for nesting sites with European Starlings was thought to decrease reproductive success, but recent studies show that this may not be the case. The mere fact that starlings nest earlier than this woodpecker suggests that Red-heads may not be vulnerable to starling invasion. Habitat has been degraded by the harvesting of snags, clearcuts, agricultural development, channeling of rivers, regeneration of eastern forests, fire suppression, monoculture crops, and the loss of small orchards.

Conservation
The Red-headed Woodpecker is listed as a vulnerable species in Canada and is listed on multiple state threatened species lists in the United States. Habitat should be managed so as to provide large forest fragments (>2 ha) with large snags for nesting and open areas for catching flying insects. In addition, selective thinning has been shown to increase the likelihood of occurrence and nesting in Ohio. Controlled fires have negative and positive impacts. While they open up the forest (providing open space for fly catching) and create snags, they can also destroy existing snags used for nesting.

The Red-headed Woodpecker is listed as a priority species in Partners in Flight’s Bird Conservation Plan for the Upper Great Lakes Plain (http://www.partnersinflight.org). One of the objectives of this plan is to increase Red-headed Woodpeckers by 3% per year in USFWS Region 3 from 1980-2010 as measured by the Breeding Bird Survey.

What Can You Do?
Audubon’s Important Bird Area program is a vital tool for the conservation of Red-headed Woodpeckers as well as other species. To learn more about the Important Bird Area programs in New York and Colorado, and other states with breeding populations of Red-headed Woodpeckers, and how you can help, visit: http://www.audubon.org/bird/iba/

Volunteers are crucial to the success of programs that monitor the long-term status of wintering populations of Red-headed Woodpeckers and other bird species. Audubon’s Christmas Bird Count (CBC) is one of the longest-running citizen-science monitoring programs in the world and has helped to follow changes in the numbers and distribution of Red-headed Woodpecker.
Information on where Red-headed Woodpeckers occur and in what numbers is vital to conserving the species. Help in monitoring this and other species by reporting your sightings to eBird. A project of Audubon and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, eBird is the world’s first comprehensive on-line bird monitoring program.
The Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology and the USDA Forest Service coordinate Birds in Forested Landscapes, a citizen-science project that links volunteer birders and professional ornithologists in a study of the habitat requirements of North American forest birds, including Red-headed Woodpecker. To learn more about Birds in Forested Landscapes, and how you can participate in the project, visit: http://birds.cornell.edu/bfl/