Summer World_ A Season of Bounty - Bernd Heinrich [11]
Unexpectedly I hear the resounding “whoosh-whoosh-whoosh” of heavy wing beats, and what T. Gilbert Pearson in 1917 called the “Lord God bird” and we now more commonly refer to as the pileated woodpecker, Dryocopus pileatus, lands beside me. In the same instant that I recognize the woodpecker, it recognizes its mistake and flies to the next tree. A pair of these woodpeckers had recently been making their nest cavity in a poplar nearby in the woods. It will take the pair a month to finish excavating their nest hole—one that will next year probably be used by wood ducks or maybe a pair of screech owls or saw-whet owls. Nesting is evident all around. In the distance I now also hear the “baby bird” caws of a crow—and I know them as the sound of a female incubating eggs and begging her mate to come feed her.
A Canada goose gander patrols along the edge of the cattails, and his loud calls echo over the pond. He is responding to another’s call, which I hear coming from the distance. His mate remains silent. She is ready to incubate four beige eggs cradled in a nest she has made by pulling the cattail leaves under her while perched on a muskrat lodge. It is her fertile period, and he does not want company in his domestic affairs, especially at this time.
A second pair of geese have started building their nest on the opposite shore of the beaver pond, and this gander ignores them. However, every morning and evening several other geese visit the pond, probing to find an opening. He and the other pair unite to attack visitors, and so far have invariably chased them off. These visitors are highly motivated, as are the defenders. Within several more days it will be too late to start raising a family of goslings this summer. The grackles are much more sociable nesters than the geese. Five pairs of grackles have banded together as a small colony. Every year they nest in the same small section of the cattails close to where the geese nest.
It appears that the geese and grackles know each other as individuals, and I suspect that the red-winged blackbirds are as capable. Both came to the bog in small flocks and will soon nest near each other. Every day they come to our bird feeder in groups of about half a dozen, even after they stake out their nesting niches in the bog. The individual male red-wings have their own little stations or territories, and although they tolerate neighbors there, they gang up on others who come by. The grackles came back to the bog as a group, males and females together. The red-wings also came as a group, but the first vanguard is always all males. The females come weeks later, and they should arrive any day now.
The red-wings and grackles are here constantly, and by now I scarcely watch them anymore. But today I had special visitors: two pairs of wood ducks. I noticed them first as dark formed on the water among the sedge hummocks. They seemed to follow one another, stop, reverse, swirl, and swerve. I don’t often use my binoculars, because they greatly restrict my field of vision, but this time I retrieved them from under my jacket. From a distance I had seen no color, but now the females, clad in soft gray plumage, provided a pleasing contrast to the males’ bold patterns of red, white, black, purple, tan, green, and blue, a costume so flamboyantly gaudy that it would be hard to dream up. They glistened, and their colors were reflected in the water next to them.
The wood ducks seemed to be animated little robots who swerved erratically into and out of the sedges before aggregating at and swimming around an old abandoned beaver lodge. A mallard drake joined them. His luminescent green head seemed to glow, and he held his head high and turned it this way and that. His soft, barely audible calls sounded like exhalations with a sharp edge. Eventually a female flew in and, while quacking loudly, splashed down beside him. He relaxed then and the two, dipping periodically with their heads underwater and their tails straight up, fed together. After a