Early Spring Visitors

Spring has fully arrived through an accelerating process that started modestly enough but quickly built momentum with each new plant shoot to poke through the soil, every adult insect that emerged from its over-wintering stem or soil chamber, and the return of migrating birds that graced the woods with their presence on their journeys farther North. If you spend even a little bit of time in the woods each day, you begin to notice just how quickly things change this time of year. Every day new wonders appear that were not present the day before. Short, dainty spring ephemeral wildflowers open their petals and their leaves absorb sunlight before the canopy closes above them in just a couple weeks. Bees, wasps, flies, and beetles shake off their groggy slumbers in the cold of the mornings and start to buzz around as the sun rises in the sky and warms the earth and air. Warblers, kinglets and sparrows fill the air with their fresh breeding songs and raspy calls as they forage for tiny insects and spiders in the trees. It's a time when change and possibility seem like the natural rhythm of the world.

Wood Anemone - Anemone quinquefolia

Amidst this time of a seemingly endless supply of natural revelations, I was especially excited to find a bird I had never seen in Oakton's woodlands until this past week. Out exploring the little ponds and wet areas of the flatwoods with my environmental science class, traipsing through the woods with rubber boots, I saw a large black bird flying from tree to tree in the distance. About the size of a crow, but with a flight pattern very unlike most crows I have ever seen, the bird careened like a heavy dart through the upper parts of the leafless trees landing directly on the trunks of the largest trees. This distinctive flight pattern immediately quickened my pulse, and I started splashing through the woods after the bird. There's really only a few kinds of birds that land directly on tree trunks - woodpeckers, nuthatches, and brown creepers come to mind - but none of those birds could be mistaken for something as large as a crow. There is only one species in North America that fits that bill - the Pileated Woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus) - the largest woodpecker on the continent (if we sadly assume that the Ivory-billed Woodpecker is indeed extinct).

Pileated Woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus)

One of the weird features of the biogeography of North American species is that Pileated Woodpeckers appear to live and breed in almost all of Eastern North America - except for two places in around the Southern Great Lakes where they are absent - Northern Illinois and Southeastern Wisconsin and near the west end of Lake Erie where Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio converge. This has always baffled me, as there are plenty of forests in these areas with relatively large trees for nesting and foraging for insects. It's a small mystery to continue to ponder.

This quirky distribution was always a source of disappointment to me as a kid growing up in the Chicago Region who loved birds - and especially large, colorful, and distinctive birds like Pileated Woodpeckers. So I was excited to say the least when I spotted this bird in the distance - so much so that I left my students behind (temporarily) to chase off after the woodpecker to try to see it up close. I am happy to report that my hurried splashing through the woods did not startle the bird enough to scare her away, and when I got close enough for a good view in the binoculars I could indeed confirm that she was a female, with a handsome black mustache marking that started at the base of the bill and ran diagonally down her cheek. Males have a red mustache in the same place. She didn't really seem to take much notice of me, intent as she appeared to be foraging for ants on the trees. Carpenter ants (Camponatus spp.) make up a large portion of the diets of Pileated Woodpeckers, and they often impressively tear out large rectangular pieces of trees in search of their favorite food. The nest holes Pileated Woodpeckers excavate also create important cavities used by many other woodland denizens, including owls, wood ducks, swifts, bats, squirrels, and even small mammalian predators like pine martens. I was lucky enough to get a couple decent photographs of her before she flew off though the woods in search of more ants or whatever it was she was searching for in woodlands that are not often visited by her kind.

I hope that it will not be another decade before I see one grace Oakton's woods again.