Certain birds arrest my attention. A streaking peregrine falcon... a bittern standing stone still in a marsh 鈥� a scarlet tanager or indigo bunting doing anything, anywhere... the effervescent song of a winter wren. Red-headed woodpeckers make my list, as well.They're flamboyant. As their name implies, adults have red heads, breathtakingly red, resembling hoods. Everything else is black and white: back and tail black; belly and rump white. When perching, large, rectangular white patches on the trailing edge of each wing make the birds鈥� lower back appear white. Males and females are indistinguishable, and juveniles are dusky-headed and streaked.
Unfortunately, I rarely see them in the Upper Valley. Only twice, in fact: once at a feeder in East Thetford, and once across the Connecticut River, on a floodplain elm in Haverhill; both events more than thirty years ago. Corroborating my own paltry sightings, the Second Atlas of Breeding Birds of Vermont, published in 2013, failed to document a single red-headed woodpecker nest.
But this wasn鈥檛 always the case.
In colonial times, they were almost domestic, and a century ago, they were numerous enough in New England to be considered a crop pest. Then, in the 1960s and 70s, after a sharp population decline, red-headed woodpeckers benefited for a while from the great Elm tree die-off. But their fortunes here changed again as regenerating forests choked off the open woodlands with little or no understory - which Red-headed woodpeckers prefer.
Then, recently, I visited my son Jordan in central Ohio, a freshman at Kenyon College, where the campus is typical of those found in the Midwest, landscaped with stately trees that tower above manicured lawns. There, on a slope between my son鈥檚 dorm and the athletic center, I spotted five pugnacious red-headed woodpeckers chasing each other from tree to tree, limb to limb, stopping occasionally to rap on a resonant branch or to snatch aerial insects 鈥� as would a flycatcher or waxwing.
Red-headed woodpeckers are one of only four woodpecker species (worldwide) that stores food, both scattered and in larders. It鈥檚 perhaps the most omnivorous woodpecker in North America. They eat wood-boring and aerial insects, grasshoppers, hapless mice, and bird eggs. And their reproduction rate is dependent on the multi-year cycle of beechnuts and acorns.
Standing there on Jordan鈥檚 campus, I recalled that nearly fifty years ago, I鈥檇 been a college freshman myself in Indiana, where I鈥檇 stood transfixed by the same gorgeous and spirited birds... old friends still, but now seldom seen.
