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.”