This story is the second in a series about a pair of pileated woodpeckers (Dryocopus pileatus) along the Clark Fork River near Missoula, Montana, USA. If you haven’t heard last month’s installment, you can start there… or just jump in here!
April 21, 2024. It’s a sunny but windy afternoon along the Clark Fork River. It’s been just over a week since I last came here. The intervening days have been cool and gusty, punctuated by a short-lived spring snowstorm. Everything changes so fast in this season. Now the leaves are bursting forth along the river where a week ago the trees were gray. The floodplain forest is perfumed with the scent of cottonwoods (Populus balsamifera), the canopy filled with a haze of pale coppery green. This time I’m with my Helena-based wildlife photographer friends Lea Frye and Rachel Ritacco. I’ve decided to entrust them with the secret of the nest tree, knowing they will care for the sensitive nest location as well as I do.
This time, we hear a pileated woodpecker even before we get close to the nest. Hundreds of meters away from it still, in the more heavily-traveled section of the park, we find the male drumming on a dead section of a branching cottonwood trunk. The drumming carries far through the springtime forest.
The nest tree
As we approach the nest tree, though, all is quiet. The wind is stronger here along the river, whooshing through the forest. Tree swallows (Tachycineta bicolor) forage energetically over the water, their calls faint above the wind noise, but the cottonwood snag appears abandoned. Have the pileated woodpeckers left and decided to build their nest elsewhere?
Just as we’re about to leave, the male flies in from behind us, a silent red-and-black shadow streaking past. As he arrives, the female flies out of the hole—which clearly was occupied all along—and he enters, disappearing completely. Obviously the woodpeckers have deepened the hole substantially during this chilly April week.
Wood chips on the breeze
We watch the male for over an hour and a half. Mostly, we see a black hole in a tan tree trunk. From time to time we can hear him excavating if we listen closely, a quiet tapping from deep inside the cavity. Finally, after several minutes of excavating, we see his head poking out of the entrance, a contrast of shadows and feathers partly lit by the westering sun. He observes the outside world silently for a long pause—making sure the coast is clear of predators, we suspect. Finally, he retrieves huge beakfuls of wood chips and flings them out of the entrance with forceful flicks of his head. I wonder what that sensation is like, having a mouthful of dry cottonwood shards. The west wind disperses the wood chips in the blink of an eye.
Two weeks digging a nest
Three days later, I return to the woodpeckers. It’s been 13 days now since I first noticed them digging the nest cavity. Fresh leaves the size of my fingernails are emerging on the red-osier dogwoods. Song sparrows (Melospiza melodia) are singing and red-naped sapsuckers (Sphyrapicus nuchalis) are drumming from all over the cottonwood forest, and the orb-weaving spiders have webs strung all over the place.
The sun is a few hours high and is just starting to feel warm when I arrive at the nest tree. There’s no sign of activity when I arrive, but within a few minutes the male flies in. After perching on the outside of the trunk for a while and cautiously poking his head in—checking for predators?—he enters and begins the same excavation routine I watched with Lea and Rachel a few days ago.
But this time, he only gets through one bout of tapping and wood chip throwing before something different happens.
A conversation among pileated woodpeckers
I hear a single call from a different pileated woodpecker in the distance, on the other side of the river. The male immediately pokes his head out of the hole and responds. A minute or two later, he calls again. I’m slow on the uptake, unfortunately, and don’t manage to record any of these calls. By the time I manage to turn my microphone on and begin recording, the woodpeckers have fallen silent.
Then I see the female—at least I presume it must be the female, though I’m too busy recording the sounds to lift my binoculars and confirm—fly in shallow undulations across the river, straight towards the nest tree. As she gets close, she gives a different call. She flies 10 meters past the nest snag and lands on the trunk of a live cottonwood.
The male doesn’t poke his head out this time. Instead, he begins tapping inside the cavity—a clearly communicative tapping, faster and obviously louder than his excavation noises.
The female flies to the cavity. It seems that she taps briefly on the entrance. The male pokes his head out and exits, flying away across the river. She enters, stays just a couple of seconds, and then flies off in the same direction.
Nesting in the springtime forest
What is happening here? I ask myself. It seems that the nest cavity is quite deep, perhaps close to finished. Could she have been soliciting a mating? Are they laying eggs, or getting ready to?
Nesting season is definitely progressing. That afternoon, as I’m still wandering along the river, a song sparrow flushes silently from the grasses almost at my feet. I freeze. Searching carefully, I manage to find the nest, a neatly woven cup nearly at ground level, tucked in a clump of last year’s reed canarygrass leaves. There are at least three nestlings inside. I snap a photo and quickly back off.
A profusion of May voices
Almost a month passes before I’m able to visit the pileated woodpeckers again. It’s a rainy morning in late May. The sweet, resinous scent of cottonwood leaves permeates the air. Their canopies catch the steady, life-giving rain and concentrate it into big fat drops that splash against the red-osier dogwood foliage below.
A northern waterthrush (Parkesia noveboracensis) is singing loudly near the side channel of the river that protects the nest tree from attention. The log I usually cross is almost submerged in the spring flow, and the low swales along the river have become elongated pools. Migrating Swainson’s thrushes (Catharus ustulatus) and hermit thrushes (Catharus guttatus) are foraging in the understory. Occasionally I hear their faint calls through the rain.
When I arrive at the nest tree, I find a relatively protected place to sit under a cottonwood and I watch. A gray catbird (Dumetella carolinensis) is lurking in the shrubs near the song sparrow’s territory. Another northern waterthrush is singing from the denser shrubs behind me.
Incubation?
It doesn’t take long for the pileated woodpeckers to appear. The female flies in silently and perches at the entrance to the nest. I notice that she’s not carrying food or anything else in her beak. She waits there for a while, tilting her head slightly. Then I glance away at a critical instant and miss seeing what happens—but suddenly a pileated woodpecker is flying away across the river. A minute later, I see the other woodpecker poke its head out of the cavity, then disappear back inside.
By now I had been expecting to find the parents feeding chicks, but what I’m seeing isn’t lining up. Are they still incubating?
Reading in Birds of the World, I decide that they almost have to be. The incubation period is supposed to be around 18 days, and adults are quiet and secretive during this time. But by day three after hatching, “nestlings sound like [a] beehive.” We definitely haven’t reached the beehive stage yet.
June growth
I’m not able to return to the island again until June 13, a sunny morning in a stretch of sunny mornings. The combination of May rains and June sun has made everything grow in the blink of an eye. Smooth brome and reed canarygrass are about to flower; the horsetails are lush and dewy; and the cottonwood canopy is green-gold and glossy where the sun is touching it. The melting snow in the mountains has made the river even higher than last time. The log across the channel seems slightly precarious, and as I follow the trail toward the pileated woodpecker nest the only tracks I see in the mud are those of the deer.
This time, I don’t have to wait for activity at the nest tree. Before I can even see it through the intervening cottonwoods, I hear the booming voice of a pileated woodpecker and glimpse the black form of one of the parents bouncing away through the trees. As I approach within sight of the nest, I deduce that it must have been the male whom I saw fly away: the female is still nearby, a hundred meters to my left, foraging on a live cottonwood. As she moves to a smaller dead branch protruding from the trunk and begins to forage loudly, chiseling with her powerful bill and dropping shreds of bark, I pull out my microphone and begin recording.
The nestling
Gradually, I become aware of another sound, this one coming from the nest. It’s a hoarse, insistent call, repeated over and over. The maker of the sound is a nestling, its head protruding impatiently from the hole in the tree. As the female flies to a nearer cottonwood and gives her deep kekekekeke, the begging becomes louder. She waits a few seconds more and then flies to the entrance hole, shoving food into the expectant bill of the nestling. She retreats to her calling tree, calls once more, and then flies south into the forest. The nestling falls silent, though before very long it resumes poking its head out of the hole.
It’s around half an hour later when the male arrives. He flies in without warning and the nestling only begs for a few seconds before papa woodpecker feeds it. He too flies to the same calling tree afterwards. There he perches for several seconds, perhaps taking a bit of “me time” before resuming parenting duties. Then he calls once and is gone, heading west along the river.
This concludes part two of this story about the pileated woodpeckers. Look for the third and final installment of the story next month, at the beginning of June!
Further reading
Bull, E.L. and J.A. Jackson. (2020). Pileated woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus), version 1.0. In Birds of the World (A.F. Poole, editor). Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, NY, USA. https://birdsoftheworld.org/bow/species/pilwoo/cur/introduction
