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Oh, Nuts! The Trials of a Red-headed Woodpecker
Should it stay or should it go?
© Jen Goellnitz CC
Knowing when to hunker down and when to move on is a matter of survival for the Red-headed Woodpecker. This noisy bird spends its summers taking insects from the sky in flashy, acrobatic flight. But prey is harder to find in winter, and in most years the woodpeckers move south. A bumper crop of acorns and other large seeds in autumn, though, can allow the birds to stock their larders, and many linger in the North.
BirdNote®
Oh, Nuts! The Trials of a Red-headed Woodpecker
Written by Rick Wright
This is BirdNote.
[Red-headed Woodpecker, ML 6857]
The Red-headed Woodpecker spends its summers in farm yards, open woodlands, and treed suburbs, snatching insects from mid-air in flashy, acrobatic flight.
Bugs are harder to come by in the winter, of course, so this type of woodpecker moves south. But not always… When autumn sees a bumper crop of acorns, beech nuts, and other large seeds, the birds stock up and linger in the North to feed through the winter.
[Red-headed Woodpecker, ML 6857]
Not all woodpeckers are efficient food hoarders. The anthropologist George A. Dorsey once watched a young Red-headed Woodpecker stuffing acorns into a hole in a telephone pole. What that bird hadn’t noticed was that the hole went all the way through to the other side of the pole, where the acorns he’d just stashed proceeded to tumble to the ground.
No word on whether that Red-headed Woodpecker stayed through the winter or found his cupboards shockingly empty and decided to migrate south.
[Red-headed Woodpecker, ML 6857]
For BirdNote, I’m Michael Stein.
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Senior Producer: Mark Bramhill
Producer: Sam Johnson
Managing Editor: Jazzi Johnson
Content Director: Jonese Franklin
Red-headed Woodpecker, ML 6857, provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York, and recorded by Robert C. Stein.
BirdNote’s theme music was composed and played by Nancy Rumbel and John Kessler.
© 2021 BirdNote January 2021 December 2024 Narrator: Michael Stein
ID#: RHWO-01-2021-01-29 RHWO-01
Rick Wright
Writer
Michael Stein
Narrator
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