2017-04-26 Third time's a charm! - a photo on Flickriver

2017-04-26 Third time's a charm!

In 2014 our male Pileated Woodpecker started a cavity, and then completed it in the spring of 2015 about 20' high in a dead water oak: vimeo.com/125308260. Unfortunately he was a single woodpecker that year, and never used the cavity, however a gray squirrel raised her babies in that cavity flic.kr/p/yQWXXS in 2015.

In 2016 he created a new cavity, very close to the top of the 40' tree, leaving the original cavity to a Wood Duck who successfully nested in it. Interestingly they rarely reuse a nest cavity, creating a new one every year, which is great for all of the other species who benefit from the vacated homes. That year he had a mate, and we watched them take turns incubating their eggs, and right about the time eggs were due to hatch we went out of town for a few days. As we drove up in the driveway, I looked in the yard and was devastated to see the tree broken right at the original 20' cavity, and the frantic parents looking everywhere on the remaining tree for their eggs or hatchlings. The top of the tree had been partially buried from the force of the fall, and it looked like an animal had disturbed it. I read that if they lose a nest that they wouldn't renest, but I did see an adult with a juvenile one day in the fall.

2017: At least 5 years ago my husband "girdled" a very tall pine in our yard, cutting the bark off all the way around (about 6" wide) to slowly kill the tree for the purpose of creating woodpecker habitat. This year the pair built a cavity about 60' high, almost in the top of the pine, and we watched them change shifts for a couple of weeks, and this morning I videoed their probably close to 3-week old babies. This video was shot over more than an hour. During one of the periods when neither parent was at the cavity, a hen Wood Duck arrived to see if the cavity was free yet, as she will certainly use it as soon as the woodpeckers are finished with it. They are very skittish this year, and I just set up the camera and let it run to minimize and disturbance to the busy parents.

Taken on: April 26, 2017

Tags:

video

GH5

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Pileated Woodpecker

nest

babies

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Wood Duck

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Stats: 10,094 views / 31 comments

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