{"id":96496,"date":"2021-03-26T06:28:11","date_gmt":"2021-03-26T12:28:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=96496"},"modified":"2021-03-26T07:22:10","modified_gmt":"2021-03-26T13:22:10","slug":"williamsons-sapsuckers-performing-their-endless-domestic-duties","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2021\/03\/26\/williamsons-sapsuckers-performing-their-endless-domestic-duties\/","title":{"rendered":"Williamson’s Sapsuckers Performing Their Endless Domestic Duties"},"content":{"rendered":"

For this species raising chicks is an unusually exhausting job.<\/p>\n

On several of my camping trips to Montana’s Centennial Valley I spent much of my time photographing two species of nesting sapsuckers in nearby areas close to the Montana\/Idaho border. This pair of Williamson’s Sapsuckers was raising a batch of fairly young chicks in their nesting cavity in an aspen at the edge of a\u00a0 dispersed USFS campsite.<\/p>\n

I’ve covered this subject before but all but one of these photos is new to Feathered Photography.<\/em><\/p>\n

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This is the male of the pair taking a brief rest as he was hanging from one of the aspen scars. Because of their habit of clinging to the side of vertical trees nearly every photo I’ve taken of a sapsucker had to be cropped vertically but this tree was leaning and the bird was hanging back far enough to allow me to crop this one horizontally. I notice stuff like that.<\/p>\n

Williamson’s Sapsuckers exhibit far more sexual dimorphism than other woodpecker species so the sexes look very different – so much so that early naturalists were confused into thinking the two sexes were separate species.<\/p>\n

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This is the female of the pair delivering a beak-load of ants to their chicks in the nest cavity. Most ant-foraging birds regurgitate food to their young but Williamson’s Sapsuckers carry the (often still living) insects in their throat, mouth and bill. Sometimes they were carrying more ants than this.<\/p>\n

Notice the two extra-stiff and long tail feathers that assist in allowing woodpeckers to brace themselves against their near-vertical perches.<\/p>\n

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Those chicks ate a lot of ants! When they’re this age their parents, between the two of them, average about one feeding trip to the nest every three minutes, all day long. There may be as many as 7 (most often 4-6) growing chicks inside the nest cavity so you can imagine how many insects, mostly tiny ants, they require.<\/p>\n

As a result one of the adults was often still inside the nest cavity when the other one arrived with another load of ants. When that happened the newly arrived adult had to lean far to one side to allow room for its mate to explosively leave the cavity.<\/p>\n

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The adults enlarge the interior of the cavity as the chicks grow (I could often hear their hammering) so that means there’s lots of wood chips to remove. Here the female is removing chips and a single fecal sac. Usually the chips and fecal sacs were carried far away from the nest tree before being discarded.<\/p>\n

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But sometimes the male in particular got lazy and dropped them from the opening to the cavity. Typically he’d open his beak and shake his head and the chips would go flying. But this time he appeared to be undecided about his technique because he shook his head without opening his beak so only some of the chips went flying. I’ve posted this photo before but in this context I thought it deserved to be seen again.<\/p>\n

I can’t imagine how much the adults must have looked forward to becoming empty-nesters again. For me it was exhausting just to watch them but it was also a hell of a lot of fun..<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For this species raising chicks is an unusually exhausting job.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":96507,"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":[334,392,1493,391,2089],"tags":[137,211,5679,2485,5681,5680,276,2039,2038],"class_list":["post-96496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","category-montana-favorite-locations","category-nesting-and-mating","category-williamsons-sapsuckers","tag-female","tag-male","tag-montana-and-idaho-border","tag-nest-cavity","tag-removing-fecal-sac","tag-removing-wood-chips","tag-sexual-dimorphism","tag-sphyrapicus-thyroideus","tag-williamsons-sapsucker"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/williamsons-sapsucker-4836b-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-p6o","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96496","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=96496"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96496\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/96507"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}