When incubation was in progress I found the parent birds to be relieving one another at intervals of about two hours; and a week later, when the young were still small, they were coming in with food and replacing one another at intervals of approximately one hour. It may have been accidental, and yet it seemed to me noteworthy, that the routine of hourly visits was broken when the female returned after an absence of 10 minutes to afford the male freedom for 40 minutes before he returned to retire within the cavity for the night.
At the time when hatching was near, and afterward when the young were newly hatched, one or the other of the parent birds was constantly present in the nesting chamber and, the weather being warm, was much of the time perched immediately within the hole. And I then realized the value of the larger dimensions of the upper portion of the chamber. The waiting bird was constantly moving about, thrusting its head out and withdrawing it again, turning about within the chamber so that it had free view outward, preening, reaching upward with its foot and scratching its head. And all this movement was free because the space was wide.
Each of the parents seemed to have its own path of approach to the nest. One of them came almost invariably to a particular position on the trunk, about 6 feet below and to the right, and hopped up thence to the entrance, but the other bird followed a different course.
I was impressed, too, with the comparative silence of the birds at their nesting tree. Such small converse as took place there (a flicker-like wuck-a-wuck—and it occurred irregularly) was so soft as to be scarcely audible to human ears at a distance of fifty yards.
The feeding of the young is by regurgitation; and, while the young are still small and remain at the bottom of the nesting cavity, the parents may be seen to follow an interesting routine. The incoming bird hops to the hole, perches on the ridge of the entrance passageway, and then swings inward and downward, at the same time elevating the posterior part of its body until the tail presses upon the outer upper rim of the hole. In this position, evidently, the parent’s bill meets those of the nestlings. This attitude is maintained often for as much as a minute, and while it is maintained the body of the bird may be seen to shake convulsively—plainly indicating that regurgitation is in progress.
When the young are small, the parent, after feeding, does not immediately leave the nest but awaits the incoming of its mate. It then glides away on wide-spread wings; and, while I suspected that the excrement of the young is carried in the bill and dropped, I was unable to detect this. Quite possibly, in this early stage at least, the excrement is swallowed by the parent.
Charles W. Townsend (1925) gave account of a family observed in Worcester County, Mass., when the young were well developed and nearly ready to leave the nest:
On June 11, 1924, I spent five hours within twenty-five feet of the base of the stub, unconcealed, and on June 14, six hours, but after the first hour I took up a position about fifty yards away, partially concealed by bushes.
My observations may be summarized as follows: the young were fed eleven times at the first visit, four times at the second when the adults acted in a very shy manner. As a rule the female fed the young, but on three occasions the male was identified at the hole. * * *
As a rule the adult appeared suddenly at the hole, flying noiselessly through the forest. Occasionally it alighted below the hole and rapidly ascended by hops, or it alighted on some neighboring tree, and often calling like a Flicker, glided on motionless outstretched wings in a graceful curve to its young. The flight away from the hole was always direct after a preliminary downward glide and lacked the usual woodpecker undulations. * * *