Sunrise comes early in Arizona.
Most of the state doesn't switch to daylight saving time, so daybreak arrives around 5 a.m. in late spring. The birds get up with the sun, so I was nudged from sleep at 5:20 by the soft cooing of a white-winged dove. That gentle awakening was shattered moments later by a metallic staccato; a Gila (pronounced HE-lah) woodpecker was greeting the morning by hammering on the chimney's metal flashing.
Most birds claim their nesting territory by singing. Their song tells other males of their species that this place is taken. For many birds, this is their feeding range, too, and establishing this territory ensures that they have enough to feed themselves and raise a family.
Woodpeckers don't sing. They announce their claims by hammering on something. That's usually a dead tree, but occasionally male woodpeckers find that man-made structures work even better. Wood siding and metal gutters resonate nicely, and homeowners are often driven to distraction by a woodpecker that uses their house as a sounding board.
Trees are on short supply in the deserts around Phoenix, and with so little rainfall, most houses don't have gutters. But local woodpeckers have found that the flashing around chimneys does very nicely.
But if there are so few trees, where do they nest?
In a landscape where you can see for miles without a tree in sight, there are still large plants that offer ideal nest sites. Giant saguaro cactuses are abundant in much of Arizona. They can be as much as 2 feet in diameter and 50 feet tall, although growing to that size takes many years; the larger saguaros may be 200 years old.
Saguaros make excellent nest sites for woodpeckers because they are relatively easy to excavate a nest in, the living tissue of the plant keeps the nest interior cool, and the cactus spines discourage raiding by nest predators. They even provide food. Saguaros bloom in spring, the tops of each arm crowded with clusters of 3-inch white flowers. I watched as a female Gila woodpecker perched on a cactus and filled her bill with flower parts, then dropped to her nest a couple of feet below and passed the food to her waiting nestlings.
Gila woodpeckers sometimes use the same nest for years. But what happens when they stop using them?
They don't go to waste. There are lots of other birds that are quite happy to take up residence in a lightly used home. Ash-throated flycatchers, brown-crested flycatchers, purple martins, elf owls, screech owls, ferruginous pygmy-owls, kestrels, Lucy's warblers, even lizards, snakes and rodents will use Gila woodpecker and gilded flicker nests to shelter their families.
If you can't get to the desert Southwest to see Gila woodpeckers, just take pleasure in its close relative and the most common woodpecker in the Carolinas, the red-bellied woodpecker.
On my last evening in Arizona, I sat in the shade of a paloverde tree enjoying the steadily fading heat. A flock of Gamble's quail, always adorable with their little question-mark-shaped top-knots, gamboled across my view. Lesser nighthawks swooped low along an arroyo, hawking airborne insects. A Gila woodpecker clung to the woody rib of a dead saguaro and drummed his proclamation. Somehow, at this end of the day, the sound was much more enjoyable.
•See the Forsyth Audubon's website at forsythaudubon.org for many ways that you can enjoy and learn about birds.
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