Urban Safari: Finding The Flicker
Birding is all about the waiting...
Early Saturday.
5:30AM to be exact.
This text arrives from one of our local RainyDayMagazine readers:
"Hey - Let me know if you’d like to see the Flicker’s tree (and hopefully a Flicker too) today. In recent days, the Flickers seem to be staying most of the time inside the cavity within the tree.
Most of my time there is spent staring at the hole...the hole always appear to be empty and the tree deserted, but then without warning the male or female pokes their head out of the hole and sometimes takes a short jaunt outside the tree. It’s hard to know what’s going on inside the tree, but my best guess is that the they are taking turns sitting on a clutch of eggs - that would explain why we don’t see them much right now. Once the eggs hatch, they’ll be going in and out a lot to bring food back to the nestlings. I’m would be happy to show you the tree. No worries if standing in the cold waiting for a brief appearance of a bird isn’t appealing. Let me know. I’m obsessed and will probably visit the tree once or twice today either way."
He had us at “Flicker” !!!
The Nest
We met up a few hours later and hiked in with gear in tow. It had rained heavily the day before, so everything on the trail was damp to dripping, but the going was fairly easy. After a short hike in, the trail narrowed and our guide stopped and pointed up at a 4″ hole at the top of a dead tree…the “secret location” of the nest of a Norther Flicker family!
Vanguard Endeavor 65A Spotting Scope in action (but we’re still not telling you where we are.)
Waiting, waiting, waiting…
Northern Flicker
What’s the Latin for “Cutie Patootie”?
We saw the Flicker twice…once after 5 minutes of setting up (which got us all excited!) and then 60 minutes later when we decided we had waited enough and were thinking about calling it a day, bird-watching-wise.
I see you seeing me…
Closeups
As we were JUST about to break things down (literally, we had just started to turn the knob to remove the camera from the mount), the Flicker poked its head out and we got these shots.
Good thing we waited an extra minute!!! It was almost as if it was just testing our patience…LOL.
Don’t think I can’t wait you out…
You look like nice people…you don’t have any unsalted peanuts there by any chance, do you?
“No? Oh well, ants it is, then. Thanks for coming by, I’ll tell the missus you said hi.”
Go here to learn more about the Northern Flicker!!!
Links to gear mentioned:
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