[cobirds] Golden-fronted Woodpecker

I was walking the LCC Woods in Lamar on 17 September 2024 when Rachel Hopper kindly called about Glenn’s amazing find of a Golden-fronted Woodpecker in Colorado.  Janeal Thompson and I drove the approximately 70 miles to the remote site nne of Sheridan Lake.  Josh Bruening was there and got us onto the bird.  The wind was howling and it was hot.  Glenn’s initial report and many to follow repeatedly showed/mentioned the bird being on fence posts at either end of a long, east to west, double-row Rocky Mountain junipers (no doubt grown in the Fort Collins nursery of the Colorado State Forest Service, my former employee, let’s hear it for CSFS!).  Janeal and I got poor but diagnostic looks at the very lost woodpecker.  It was doing the best it could to make egg nog out of broken eggs in its chosen oasis amid mile after mile of mostly barren prairie transformed into hard-scrabble cropland.  The bird was amazing and it was good to see old birder friends but the heat was affecting us, so we returned to Lamar.

 

Always wanting to know how these situations work, I kept thinking about that young woodpecker and how it was coping.  The bird obviously liked the junipers.  It also went out into the field to the south of the trees, pounced on insects, and returned to the trees.  And then there were those frequent trips to the fence posts.  My assumption was the bird was probably caching items, probably juniper cones (“berries”) and/or insects (mostly likely grasshoppers and beetles), in fence post cracks.  Most of us have probably seen Red-headed, Lewis’s, Acorn and other woodpeckers do such things.

 

On my return to Fort Collins yesterday (9/19), I decided to make a slight diversion and return to the Cheyenne CR H site just west of CR 53 to check out those posts.  Very few cracks.  A few very old, dry insects stuffed into one, but not what I expected to see.  No fresh insects. No juniper berries.  I now think the woodpecker is simply using those posts as a backdrop for dismantling captured insects.  I saw it do that with a black field cricket (Gryllus sp.) it caught on the ground (like the one pictured below at left), took to a dead juniper and then to the post for final processing.  The post shown below is the one at the extreme northwest corner of the tree row.  Others reported seeing the bird go to similar posts at the northeast corner of the tree row near the H/53 road intersection.

 

Another habitat feature I would point out to people who might be going out there is the presence of one VERY large, ominous-but-harmless gopher snake (aka “bullsnake”) and some folks there yesterday reported seeing a rattlesnake in taller weeds/grass between the two juniper rows.  I also saw another dead rattlesnake on the road and a hired man of the owners told me rattlesnakes are common in that area. 

 

               

 

Dave Leatherman

Fort Collins