Summer World_ A Season of Bounty - Bernd Heinrich [64]
17 June 2005. I’m on a platform of boards I have built about twenty feet up, between some close-spaced young red maple trees near my camp in Maine. I’m facing a single big birch tree that has four active sapsucker licks. The tree has just leafed out, although many of the other forest trees are still bare. There is a light rain, and temperatures are in the mid-fifties Fahrenheit.
Sapsucker licks are hubs of life in these woods at this time, and I want to take the pulse of this life. I hope to see surprises, even as I want to learn the routine. Today I’ve already established that there are at least two sapsuckers coming to this one tree. They regularly come from the same direction, fly to a tap, touch the sap hole with the tip of the bill, extend the tongue, and lick sap as they vibrate the head rapidly. Numerous ruby-throated hummingbirds come and go, and some of them stay and aggressively defend the site against others that come near. One female perched near me and about ten feet from a lick. She jerked her head from side to side, steadily, like a metronome, once per second. I knew she was getting ready for another feed at a lick when she turned in that direction, stretched, and then zipped over to it and hovered to feed for about thirty seconds before zooming off into the woods. Another then took her place. In the afternoon, a sharp-shinned hawk shot past me like an arrow through still leafless red maple branches. It landed on a limb next to a lick; nervously turned its head here and there, probably looking for prey; and then zoomed on as quickly as it had come.
22 August 2005. I could not have chosen a better day to be in the woods, up on the same sapsucker lick viewing platform. It’s seven-thirty AM and the sun is up. I’m twenty feet up, under the leafy canopy of young red maples. I have brought along a hot cup of coffee from the cabin, and sipping leisurely, face the thick birch tree with the woodpeckers’ licks. A few red maple leaves around me show the first twinges of red, and the field next to me is ablaze with goldenrod bloom. A flock of about a dozen chickadees come sauntering by. After they pass I hear warblers cheeping in the distance. Warblers sang lustily months earlier when they were separated into their respective territories, each in its own specific habitat. Now, all is different. A loose flock of them soon drifts in, and it includes at least eight species: one chestnut-sided warbler, several black-and-white warblers, several blackburnian warblers, several ovenbirds, many Canada warblers, many black-throated blue warblers, a couple of black-throated green warblers, and several redstarts.
Along with the warblers are at least one wood thrush, one least flycatcher, and a phoebe. They stayed busily foraging all around me, for about twenty minutes. Many of them came within several feet of my face.
Six licks (each with dozens of sapsucker holes) had been heavily used for almost three months. But in one hour of watching I saw only one hummingbird come for a sip. This female (or juvenile) flew to all of the six taps but stopped only briefly, as though inspecting them and finding them dry. Except for one or two black-throated blue warblers, which hovered twice in front of a sapsucker lick but did not contact it, none of the warblers paid any attention to them. Only one sapsucker came, a juvenile from this year’s hatch. It perched about six feet from a lick for a full twenty minutes; moved its head occasionally to scan around; then stretched, preened for another ten minutes, and finally briefly inspected two licks before departing.
Twice an admiral butterfly flew by the licks without landing, and the juvenile sapsucker made a pass at it but missed. A knot of a dozen bald-faced hornets aggregated at one spot at one lick only. Perhaps they had located the one last bit of sap flow. A downy woodpecker, which had previously sometimes used the same lick, came within