{"id":36729,"date":"2016-01-18T07:05:26","date_gmt":"2016-01-18T14:05:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=36729"},"modified":"2016-01-18T08:05:11","modified_gmt":"2016-01-18T15:05:11","slug":"williamsons-sapsuckers-part-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2016\/01\/18\/williamsons-sapsuckers-part-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"Williamson’s Sapsuckers Part II"},"content":{"rendered":"

These images are a continuation of yesterday’s post <\/a>and they focus more on sapsucker behavior.\u00a0I’ve documented some of these behaviors previously but with a single exception each of these photos is new to my blog.<\/p>\n

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\"williamson's<\/p>\n

1\/3200, f\/5.6, ISO 500, Canon 7D,<\/em> Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS USM, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

The male and female were equally industrious in caring for their young. Yesterday’s post included an image almost identical to this one except the roles of the sexes\u00a0were reversed – here it’s the female delivering ants to the youngsters as the male exits the hole after delivering his own load of ants.<\/p>\n

Yesterday I mentioned that when one\u00a0woodpecker left the hole with the other one at the entrance,\u00a0the bird on the outside was always careful to move\u00a0its head out of the way to avoid\u00a0having it taken off by the explosive exit of the\u00a0other bird leaving.<\/p>\n

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\"williamson's<\/p>\n

1\/3200, f\/5.6, ISO 500, Canon 7D,<\/em> Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS USM, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

This image illustrates my point – as you can see there’s very little margin for error. Yes, I was disappointed to have clipped the\u00a0left wing…<\/p>\n

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\"williamson's<\/p>\n

1\/4000, f\/5.6, ISO 640, Canon 7D,<\/em> Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS USM, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

Both sexes did their part when it came to housecleaning. Here the male is about to leave the nest cavity with a fecal sac from one of the chicks. Fecal sacs were always carried far away from the nest tree before being discarded.<\/p>\n

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\"williamson's<\/p>\n

1\/4000, f\/5.0, ISO 640, Canon 7D,<\/em> Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS USM, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

Often the adults had a mix of both fecal sacs and wood chips in their bills that\u00a0were carried off. The parent birds\u00a0were constantly\u00a0enlarging the interior of the cavity as the youngsters grew\u00a0larger (I could\u00a0hear them chipping away\u00a0from my position outside) so those chips needed to be discarded. I could tell they were soaked in wastes so it’s an effective method of keeping the cavity clean. This image isn’t very sharp but it demonstrates the behavior from the female.<\/p>\n

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\"williamson's<\/p>\n

1\/5000, f\/5.0, ISO 640, Canon 7D,<\/em> Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS USM, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

Here the male is doing the same thing with his load that contains both wood chips and a fecal sac. He would often shake his head to lighten his load of wood chips before flying off with the sac and whatever chips remained in his bill.<\/p>\n

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\"williamson's1\/2000, f\/6.3, ISO 640, Canon 7D,<\/em> Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS USM, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

However, when they were excavating the cavity interior and had to get rid of those clean<\/em> chips they would simply shake their heads and\u00a0drop their load at the base of the tree without exiting the cavity. At times I could barely see the bird through all the flying chips. This behavior was very difficult to capture because the parent would appear so suddenly at the exit and begin shaking off the chips before I even had time to\u00a0react. You can see that his nictitating membrane is closed to protect his eye.<\/p>\n

Each of the images above was taken in the summer of 2014.<\/p>\n

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\"williamson's<\/p>\n

1\/640, f\/7.1, ISO 800, Canon 7D,<\/em> Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

In May of 2015 I returned to the area and was delighted to find what I believe to be the same male sapsucker at the nest tree. He was apparently competing with a pair of Northern Flickers for the cavity. This is among the last images I ever took of either of\u00a0the sapsuckers because\u00a0when I returned in June the nest tree had been chopped down by campers for firewood\u00a0and I found broken eggs inside the nest cavity. The callous idiocy of many of my own species\u00a0never ceases to depress me.<\/p>\n

There’s more on that sad story here<\/a> if you’re interested (many readers have seen that post before). But prepare yourself if you decide to visit because it’s a heartbreaker.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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These images are a continuation of yesterday’s post and they focus more on sapsucker behavior.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":36730,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[334,1493,391,2089],"tags":[50,2109,137,211,220,2485,2812,2039,2038,2110],"class_list":["post-36729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-montana-favorite-locations","category-nesting-and-mating","category-williamsons-sapsuckers","tag-behavior","tag-fecal-sac","tag-female","tag-male","tag-montana-2","tag-nest-cavity","tag-sawdust","tag-sphyrapicus-thyroideus","tag-williamsons-sapsucker","tag-wood-chips"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/williamsons-sapsucker-0095-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-9yp","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36729"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36729\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36730"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}