[va-bird] Deer Stand Musings

In my tree stand this weekend, I had ample time to watch and then ponder
a couple of bird behaviors, such as:

-how long yb sapsuckers may have been using "traditional" sap wells on
some large nearby hickory trees? Has anyone read of studies on this
topic?

The trees in question were pignut hickories with trunk diameters 3 ft
off the ground of 24-30 inches. The sapsuckers I viewed were both
tapping at seemingly random holes in trunks which appeared not to be
new, but also spent considerable time  tapping at those old
circumferential tree rings that visually seem to girdle trees. The lines
of individual holes are gone, replaced by what appears to be a
continuous indentation in the trunk caused by many years of tapping. 

 Is there some benefit in tapping these old holes?  It would seem that
these heavily scarred "rings" would be more difficult to obtain a sap
flow from. Might they harbor instead overwintering insects/inverts that
the bird was seeking?

-a rb woodpecker carefully ascending to the uppermost twigs and
plucking, from the opened husks of a fruit, a hickory nut. It then flew
to a nearby tulip tree where I lost visual contact.

My question is, are rb woodpeckers capable of splitting open a
thick-walled, nearly rock-like hickory nut? The shell of one of these
nuts is much harder than almost any wood and only rarely do they begin
to split open on their own. My guess is that the bird wedges the nut in
a crevice and then pounds away at it but perhaps they employ fox or gray
squirrels to gnaw them open in exchange for some unknown service.


Craig Tufts
St. Louis, VA

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