Re: [cobirds] Fun with Flickers and Fun with House Wrens

Inspired by David's post highlighting the interesting things one can see and learn by watching common birds, I thought I'd pass along a tidbit from my resident house wrens- considerably after the fact, of course. I have three wren houses in my yard, and usually have at least two families of wrens and quite a bit of double-brooding. I also have two flicker boxes that A) give the flickers a place to nest, and B) more importantly, keeps them from excavating giant chunks out of the side of my house.

Sometime in the late fall I undertake the job of cleaning out the wren houses to prepare them for occupancy in the spring. Those who have cleaned out wren nests know that they are a masterpiece of effort, if not artistic accomplishment. Those little rascals make an unbelievable number of trips to get hundreds of twigs into the nest cavity, often struggling for several minutes to fit a long stick in a small hole. Anyway, after clearing the wren houses, I recalled that one of the wrens had co-opted a flicker box for its second round of nesting. The flicker box is high enough that I need a ladder to get to it, so I had procrastinated a bit. I finally got up there, wondering what I would find when I opened the box. When I opened the box, I gasped with amazement! Well, not really, but it was pretty interesting: the wren had filled that entire box with twigs, and it is a big box. There were so many packed in there that it took me five minutes to pry them all out. If I had a little more time on my hands, it would have been interesting to count them. It would probably have taken only a year or so. There had to be thousands. And every one of them represents a round trip by a tiny bird.

Birds never fail to amaze, do they not?

Norm Lewis

Lakewood, CO

-----Original Message-----
From: David Suddjian <dsuddjian@gmail.com>
To: Colorado Birds <cobirds@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Sun, Dec 6, 2015 3:33 pm
Subject: [cobirds] Fun with Flickers

This is not a report of unusual birds, but I've had three recent observations of interesting Norther Flicker behavior that I thought would be fun to share.

In my yard a few days ago a flicker was attracted to suet hanging in a cage from the end of a branch. Apparently deciding he didn't want to, or couldn't, land on the cage itself, he perched directly over it, more than a body length away. He hung down and pointed his body and neck straight down and extended his tongue to the suet. The tongue darted in and out to a length that appeared to be over two lengths of the bill as he licked the suet. I'm not sure how much he got from the licking, but he stuck at it for several minutes. Other times flickers simply land on the cage and get bill fulls of suet; I'm not sure why this one did other wise. But it was fun to see that long pink tongue darting out so far!

About a week ago two flickers spent most of two hours foraging under the eaves of two moderately large buildings on the grounds of St.Mary Catholic Church in Littleton. They were after some morsels where vertical outside walls met roof overhangs. I've seen flickers work such niches before, but never in such a dedicated fashion over such a long period.

Lastly, yesterday a young female Cooper's Hawk perched in a tree near my home and was mobbed by three flickers that came to gather round its perch, taking a variety of aggressive postures, with much bobbing and bill pointing, some wing flashes, and a bunch of raucous calls. They never came less than 2 feet from the hawk, which seemed annoyed but unmoved.

David Suddjian

Littleton, CO

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