Creature Feature: Them’s Fightin’ Words…
Maple sugaring season has arrived! Across the eastern United States and Canada, many are congregating to maple trees in order to collect its sap; a type of sugary water that provides nutrients to a tree right before the start of spring. In time, sap will eventually make its way up to the limbs and branches, allowing the buds to swell and produce new leaves. Before that happens, sap collectors will happily take an amount of sap that does not compromise the tree, and transform it into the syrup and sugar that is put on foods, such as pancakes.
Many animals utilize sap as a food source during the time of late winter and early spring. Bats, squirrels, porcupines, and several birds are a few examples that choose to do this. However, these animals alone may not have the skills to get to the sap that is at least a few inches beyond the bark of a tree. To circumvent this, the animals will rely on another animal that is both capable of drilling into a tree, and leaving behind enough sap for other animals to acquire. For this month’s Creature Feature, we are going to examine a species of bird whose name sounds like it came from the mouth of Yosemite Sam.
A member of the woodpecker family, the yellow-bellied sapsucker (Sphyrapicus varius) is known for making neatly straight and spaced rows of holes into the bark of a tree. From the holes comes forth sap, which the sapsucker laps up with its brush-like tongue, adding sugar to its diet of wood, insects, berries. This practice sometimes does not go without a cost: if enough holes are drilled around the entire tree, then the tree can become girdled, the death of a tree from its top down to where the bark has been completely removed.
Photo credit: iTop Loveliness from Pixabay
Unlike our other woodpecker species, this sapsucker is the only one of its family within the eastern United States that truly migrates. The differences between males and females are fairly easy to distinguish. Males display bright red patches on both the top of their head and on the front of their throat, while the red on females is only seen on their head. In the state of Michigan, a sighting of this bird means one of two things: that they are in the process of undergoing their seasonal migrations, or they are settling in to breed. Ultimately, it depends on which part of the state you are in, with the northern parts serving as their breeding habitat and the southern parts serving as migration stopovers.
Once they have settled into their breeding range and habitat, the yellow-bellied sapsucker will look for trees that are susceptible to rot, as it helps in the formation of tree cavities for a nest. Birch and aspen are good examples of this, and the presence of a hoof or tinder fungus on the tree is common because the fungus aids in the process of creating tree rot by softening the inner layers of the tree (called heartwood) while keeping the outer layers firm and intact.
After the cavity has been made, females will lay a clutch of about a half dozen white eggs, give or take. The male and female take turns incubating the eggs depending on the time of day, and after about two weeks, the eggs hatch. From there, it should take less than a month for the brood to leave their nest and go out in the world on their own.
Photo credit: Greg Sabin from Pixabay
Be on the lookout for these important birds as you stroll the trails of the nature center!
Click here to learn more about the yellow-bellied sapsucker
Submitted by Zach Mork, naturalist, March 2023