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Pre-dawn light erased the darkness while a symphony of song overtook the night's silence.
Bold and clear, the musical notes of a late-migrating white-throated sparrow came to me. The small bird couldn't contain its big voice as the song rang out from the red oak. Hyperactive red-winged blackbirds were singing 'ronk-ronk-KREE' and chattering away as they flitted from tree to reed and back again. Somewhere off to my right a rattling, piercing 'wik-wik-wik-wik' came at me like a sharp scold.
It took just a moment to find the singer of those harsh notes on that gentle morning. The bird hopped off a fallen tree and began stabbing its long, slightly curved bill into the leaf litter.
Noticeably larger than a robin, it had a bold red crescent at its nape. For a second, all I could see were the brown wings and back. Then it twisted itself and a black collar and boldly spotted breast came into view. Seconds later, it took off, showing bright yellow under its wings and tail and a brilliant white rump.
The big, pointed bill and brilliant red patch suggested that this was a woodpecker. But almost all North American woodpeckers are shades of black and white, not brown. And this bird was probing the ground for food, not clinging to a tree, searching under the bark like most of its family. It might not fit the stereotype, but this was indeed a woodpecker: a northern flicker (Colaptes auratus).
The flicker disappeared, then popped back into view, perched on a limb, where it again let loose with that insistent machine-gun song. My singular concentration on this unmusical bird had mysteriously muted the vocalizations of all the other birds. I was listening to it and no other.
As the bird flew off, I got another good view of its golden under parts. Northern flickers are found all across the nation, but there are two distinct populations. Most of the country is home to the "yellow-shafted" variety that I had been watching. In the West, though, the underwings and tail feathers are a handsome scarlet. These birds constitute the red-shafted population. The bird I had seen was a male, which has a black moustache on its tan face. The red-shafted birds have a gray face, with males exhibiting a red moustache. Counter-intuitively, the western birds lack the red nape of the yellow-shafted.
As their ground-feeding behavior suggests, flickers do not use their bills to drills holes to get at insects that lie inside trees. Instead, these birds probe loose soil, leaves and ground-loving vegetation in pursuit of beetles, ants and other treats.
Most woodpeckers are rather sedentary. They stake out territory and continue to occupy it year-round. Here, too, flickers differ from the woodpecker norm. They are year-round residents in almost all of the United States, Mexico and Central America. But during the breeding season, many individuals migrate far north into Canada. The birds we see in the Chesapeake Basin in winter may be excavating nests and raising families in northern Canada come June.
If flickers are year-round residents, why haven't I seen them more often? The answer lies in the bird's piercing, rising-and-falling call. Like so many of its avian brethren, flickers are far more conspicuous during the mating season when they are such obsessive singers.
To humans, a song is a pleasing vocalization with tempo and rhythm. But in the world of birds, songs can range from the haunting, flute-like tones of a hermit thrush to the raucous squawk of a ring-necked pheasant.
Bird songs are united in their functions, not their sounds. A few birds, like the exuberant mockingbird, sing year-round. For most species, though, song exists for finding and attracting mates as well as defending territory. In some species, only the male sings, although both genders use calls to locate, warn or otherwise communicate.
But in this, at least, the flicker fits the pattern. The birds sing their ear-splitting songs in the spring and early summer. And when they sing, they are hard to ignore, as the flicker I had seen in the pre-dawn light had demonstrated. If it had been October, a flicker might have been equally close, but would have passed by unseen simply because he hadn't demanded my attention with his noisy song.
All around me this morning, avian voices had filled the air. In that dawning light, I was serenaded by an entire orchestra. Through all those sounds, individual birds were hearing songs and calls that were speaking just to them and their desires.
Personally, I prefer flutes to snare drums. But songs of love, it seems, come in all varieties. And that's a lovely song, indeed.
This article credits Bay Journal news service
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