Spring drumming on a resonant limb, or inside a nesting cavity, is an essential part of the call to courtship or mating, and perhaps a signal call for other purposes; but it is used at other times, perhaps for sheer amusement. This habit sometimes becomes a nuisance, since the bird has discovered that the tin roof of a house serves as the best kind of a drum; here he comes morning after morning while we are enjoying our slumbers, from which we are rudely awakened at an unseemly hour. Mr. DuBois writes to me that, on an afternoon in June, “a flicker was drumming on the lid of a large galvanized iron ash or garbage can at the corner of the back porch of a residence; he stood on the top of the lid and, at intervals, after looking around, he beat an extremely rapid roll on this metallic drum; the effect was startling.”
As to the roosting habits of flickers, Miss Sherman (1910) writes: “Of all our birds the flickers are the earliest to retire at night, sometimes going to their lodgings an hour before sundown, the customary time being about a half hour before sunset. Generally they go out soon after sunrise, but on cool autumn mornings they have been known to linger much longer. During a rainstorm in the middle of the day they have been seen to seek their apartments, also in fine weather they have been found there enjoying the seclusion thus afforded.”
Frank R. Smith, of Hyattsville, Md., sends me the following note, dated February 28, 1936: “For some nights, a flicker has been roosting in the shell of a dead tree, from which one side has decayed away, leaving a troughlike section of its trunk standing. He roosts about 12 feet from the ground. This morning it was cloudy and he left the roosting place at 7:25, although official sunrise is at 6:37.” Mr. Shelley tells me that he flushed a male from the nest tree, “where he clung each night about 3 feet above the nest hole, with the female brooding the young within.” Flickers will roost in any open cavity in a tree, or even in a partially sheltered spot on the open trunk; they often drill holes in barns or under the eaves of houses for winter roosts; a favorite winter roosting place is in the sawdust between the double walls of icehouses. Sometimes they dig a hole into a vacant building and fail to find their way out; I once found one dead inside the garage at my summer cottage, which had been closed all winter. Mr. Forbush (1927) says that “during one winter at Wareham one apparently slept on the wall of my summer cottage under the eaves, clinging to one of the ornamental battens in an upright position as it would cling to a tree trunk. This bird for some unaccountable reason chose the north side of the cottage. He was there night after night at dusk and also at daylight each morning. Mr. K. F. Carr tells of a flicker that was accustomed to pass winter nights in a chimney of an unoccupied dwelling in a thickly settled neighborhood which undoubtedly was a more comfortable roosting place than the north side of my cottage.”
Dr. Lynds Jones told Mr. Burns (1900) that “at Oberlin College a single bird roosted between the vertical water pipe and wall of Spear Library for two successive winters, and another occupied the cupola of the Theological Seminary the succeeding winter.”
Flickers are generally regarded as peaceful harmless birds, but the following two quotations indicate that they are sometimes otherwise.
O. P. Allert (1934) writes from Giard, Iowa: “On June 4, 1933, while in the yard of my home, I was attracted by the cries of a pair of Robins and saw a female Flicker in the act of killing the two young that the Robins’ nest contained. One was killed in the nest, and the other either fell or was thrown to the ground, where the Flicker followed and dispatched it.”
Dr. Dayton Stoner (1932) writes: “While the flicker is not habitually belligerent, it does on occasion show some aggressiveness. This most frequently occurs during the breeding season. For example, on July 11, 1929, in the Parker woods south of Lakeport, I came upon several flickers and two or three crows that were tormenting a red-shouldered hawk. The flickers were pecking excitedly on the limbs of the tree on which the hawk perched, and clamoring loudly at it. When the hawk flew off the flickers darted after it, pecking it unmercifully until it lit again, when they were cautious about approaching close to the harassed hawk. This quarrel was continued for more than half an hour.”
Voice.—The flicker has an elaborate vocabulary; no other woodpecker, and few other birds, can produce a greater variety of loud striking calls and soft conversational notes. A number of its many vernacular names are based on a fancied resemblance to some one of its notes, and in most cases these names give a very fair idea of the note. A few of such names are “flicker,” “yucker,” “wacup,” “hit-tock,” “yarrup,” “clape,” and “piute”; and there are other modifications of these in different combinations of letters.
The commonest and most characteristic note is the loud spring call, of which Eugene P. Bicknell (1885) says: “Its long rolling call may be taken as especially representative of song, and is a characteristic sound of the empty woodland of early spring. It is usually given from some high perch, and has a free, far-reaching quality, that gives it the effect of a signal thrown out over the barren country, as if to arouse sleeping nature. This call continues irregularly through the summer, but then loses much of its prominence amid the multitude of bird voices. It is not infrequent in September, but later than the middle of October I have not heard it.”
This is a sharp, penetrating note, which can be heard at a long distance; the syllables wick, wick, wick, wick, or yuck, yuck, yuck, yuck, are very rapidly uttered and repeated in long series. Dr. Elon H. Eaton (1914) says that “it may be heard for more than half a mile and has been variously syllabized, usually written as ‘cuh-cuh-cuh-cuh’,” which hardly represents my idea of the song.