COLAPTES CAFER CAFER (Gmelin)
NORTHWESTERN FLICKER
Plate [38]
HABITS
The northwestern flicker was formerly known as Colaptes cafer saturatior Ridgway, type locality Neah Bay, Wash. But it has since been learned that Gmelin’s name Picus cafer was based on a bird taken at Bay of Good Hope, Nootka Sound, British Columbia. As this locality is well within the range of the northwestern flicker, Gmelin’s name has priority over Ridgway’s saturatior.
This larger and more richly colored race of Colaptes cafer inhabits the humid Northwest coast region, from Sitka, Alaska, to northern California, Humboldt County, including most of southern British Columbia east to the Kootenay district. It is not only larger than Colaptes cafer collaris, but its upper parts are browner and its under parts are more strongly suffused with vinaceous.
D. E. Brown writes to me that this “is the common woodpecker of western Washington. It will outnumber all the other woodpeckers two to one.” Referring to its haunts on Mount Rainier, Taylor and Shaw (1927) say: “As the noisiest and most conspicuous, adaptable, and broadly distributed woodpecker in the park, the flicker is bound to achieve some notoriety. It avoids the dark woods, and undoubtedly prefers the tracts of dead stubs which are encountered at fairly frequent intervals around the mountain; for here both nesting sites and food are present in great abundance.”
Major Bendire (1895) says that “in western Oregon, and probably also in northwestern California, it appears to be found only on the summits of the different mountains between the Cascades and the coast during the breeding season, where the same moist climate prevails as is found in the immediate vicinity of the coast, while in the drier lowlands, such as the Umpqua, Rogue, and Willamette river valleys, it is replaced by” Colaptes cafer collaris.
Nesting.—The nesting habits of the northwestern flicker do not seem to differ materially from those of its close relative farther south. D. E. Brown tells me that this bird “will nest anywhere where there is room to dig out a cavity large enough for the nest. I have found them in large stumps and in fenceposts and from 18 inches from the ground to 100 feet up. They will nest in birdboxes of suitable size and will use them for winter homes. The eggs are from 5 to 10 in number and may be found May 1 to August. Both birds incubate and, when incubation is advanced, sit very close; sometimes they are removed by hand.”
Harry S. Swarth (1911a) reports a nest, found at Portage Cove, Revillagigedo Island, Alaska, that “was in a dead stub, some fifty feet from the ground. The stump was so rotten that an attempt to climb it brought down the whole upper portion, including the nest, in a mass of disintegrated punk. * * * The nest tree was in a valley bordering a stream, in fairly open country, with clumps of scattered timber interspersed between the open meadows.”
Eggs.—The eggs of this race are indistinguishable from those of the red-shafted flicker, except for a slight average difference in size. The measurements of 47 eggs average 29.37 by 22.37 millimeters; the eggs showing the four extremes measure 32.0 by 23.4, 30.6 by 24.3, and 26.4 by 20.8 millimeters.
Food.—What has been said about the food of the red-shafted flicker, and to a large extent that of the northern flicker, would apply equally well to the northwestern. D. E. Brown says in his notes: “It puts in most of its time feeding on the ground and becomes quite tame around houses. I once placed some cornmeal on the back porch for some small birds. A flicker lit on the porch and, approaching the meal, laid its head sideways nearly on the floor and ran its long tongue through the meal several times; it then turned its head over and repeated the operation from the other side, leaving a checkered effect on the meal.”
Theed Pearse writes to me from Vancouver Island that he has seen “a flicker picking up grains of rolled-oats off a flat surface by a sideways action of the beak.” Flickers at his feeding station fed on apples, but seemed to prefer suet or fat.
S. F. Rathbun, of Seattle, has sent me the following interesting note: “On one occasion in November I watched a northwestern flicker for more than an hour feeding on a closely cut lawn in our yard. At different times it had visited the spot, and I became somewhat curious to know what the food represented that the bird found. This time as soon as the woodpecker alighted it commenced tapping rapidly with its beak the surface of the lawn, from time to time driving its bill into the earth. Then when this was withdrawn oftener than not it held an earthworm or some large grub, which at once was eaten and then the tapping recommenced. On two occasions I could plainly see that its prey was cutworms. But what was of particular interest was the painstaking way in which the flicker worked over every inch of the small space to which it confined its attentions, for the spot was not larger than 10 by 15 feet, and this was gone over again and again. During the time I watched the flicker it captured more than a dozen earthworms, all of which were of good size, and also eight cutworms. Another action of the bird while it was hunting caught my attention. At odd times it would vigorously scratch the surface of the lawn as if to uncover some prey, and I noticed that each time this took place, a worm would be pulled from the earth by the bird.”
He says further, in a letter, regarding this observation: “At the time we watched it, the bird was so close we had difficulty at times in using the field glasses, so could readily see what it obtained. Sometimes it would pull an angleworm from the ground very much as a robin does, the worm stretched out to quite an extent.”
Behavior.—There is nothing peculiar in the behavior of this flicker that would not apply to its close relatives equally well. But J. Hooper Bowles (1926) had his attention called in an interesting way to the regularity of its habits in going to roost. He was calling on a friend one afternoon in the fall of 1924, of which he writes: “I happened to remark that it was half past three, when my friend answered quickly, ‘In five minutes it will be bedtime for our Flicker.’ This somewhat astonished me, but we went outside the house and took a station where we could command a good view of a certain section of the eaves of the house. Sure enough, in about five minutes a Northwestern Flicker swooped up and hung itself woodpecker-fashion against a board under the eaves, where it composed itself for spending the night. The bird had been doing this with absolute regularity for some time, although it was of course broad daylight and bright sunshine.”