Life histories of North American woodpeckersBent, Arthur Cleveland
Science
Life histories of North American woodpeckers
Bent, Arthur Cleveland
Birds -- North America; Woodpeckers -- North America
M. P. Skinner says, in his Yellowstone National Park notes: “This
woodpecker is rather uncommon, but I have seen it in coniferous forests
between 6,500 and 8,000 feet, in firs, lodgepole pine, and Engelmann
spruce. I have also seen it on dead trees and on telephone poles. I
have seen this woodpecker in this Park only between May and October.”
_Nesting._--At an altitude of about 9,000 feet in the mountains of
Colorado, in or near Estes Park, John H. Flanagan (1911) collected a
set of four eggs of the alpine three-toed woodpecker. “The hole was in
an aspen stub, nine feet from the ground and about a foot or eighteen
inches from the top, and just before the guide reached the hole the
bird flew out. * * *
“The entrance to the nesting cavity was about one and one-half inches
in diameter; the cavity itself about nine or ten inches in depth and
quite large at the bottom. The eggs were laid on a few chips.”
In north-central Colorado, Edwin R. Warren (1912) found a nest of this
woodpecker “in a dead Engelmann spruce, which was twenty-five inches
in diameter at the base, and twenty at the nest hole, the latter being
seven feet above ground. The nest was eight inches deep, the entrance
one and three-quarters inches in diameter; the thickness of the wood on
the front side of the hole was two and three-quarters inches, and the
cavity was five inches from front to back, and three wide. There were
a few chips in the bottom, as well as a few of the birds’ droppings.
There were two young, about ready to fly, though I had no difficulty in
posing them on the tree for pictures; they showed little or no fear.”
Randolph Jenks (1934) discovered two nests of the alpine three-toed
woodpecker on the Kaibab Plateau, near the east rim of the Grand
Canyon, in northern Arizona. One was in “a hole in an aspen tree, two
and one-half inches in diameter, opening to the southeast, twelve feet
from the ground. The cavity was eight inches deep and the nest was
lined with a thick layer of maggot-infested sawdust. In spite of the
crawling competitors, the nestlings, a male and a female, seemed quite
contented.” This was on June 30, 1931. Several days later another nest
was found, also on the Plateau, at an elevation of 8,100 feet; this
nest was “in a hole about sixty feet above the ground in a western
yellow pine.”
Dr. Edgar A. Mearns (1890b) writes:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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