The Great and Ongoing Egg Search

Well, this post is much more belated than I thought it would be! The season’s only getting crazier, and it sounds like it’s going to get substantially worse before it gets better…still, I’ve got a bunch of photos that I want to get up here, so I’ll try to churn through some more posts quickly!

There's lupine and California poppies everywhere, which may be my new favorite color combination.

First of all, I'm into a proper, full-size room now! Sarah and Zoe have moved on and moved out, leaving me and Russel to both handle all of the job responsibilities...and lay claim to the nicer rooms on the main floor of Rob House. They have such modern luxuries as coat hooks, lamps, and desks. Okay, mine does have a walk-in closet and a full-length mirror, those are actually nice things for a dorm-style room. I've also found a place to hang my hammock outside, which is especially lovely as the weather continues to warm up.

That's Rob House down below; we were up on the hillside doing a "tick drag", which actually isn't as bad as it sounds. I mean, it's five hours long, but mostly it just means wandering back and forth over the beautiful hillside...tick handling itself isn't bad...

Aside from the living situation, I guess my day-to-day activities have also changed a fair bit since that last post. We started out doing mostly census watches—periods where we’d watch a single group of birds to try to spot all of the group members, see if any new birds had joined since we were there last, etc. Those are still important, but they’ve definitely taken a back burner as we head into the breeding season. Now, we’re looking for nests, and all else is secondary.

Yes, they just hang out like this. They'll all sit up there in a row to preen and look out over the territory.

“Looking for nests” is both simpler and more complicated than you’re probably imagining. It’s not something we can just do with binoculars, since ACWOs are cavity nesters: they drill a hole down into the tree and put their nests in it. Of course, we can see those cavities from the outside, but a given woodpecker group will have many cavities…among which they have placed exactly one nest. This means we have to actually look into the cavities (which can be anywhere from six to sixty feet off the ground) to see if they have eggs in them. For this, we have some handy-dandy extendable poles that were originally designed to let people measure the height of power lines, and we’ve stuck cameras on them. This leaves us with the activity that is currently dominating our lives: scoping.

In the words of Sarah, “Scoping is great. I love scoping.”

This is most often said after the pole has collapsed, the camera has malfunctioned, the wind has picked up, or you finally get the camera into a hole forty feet up only to discover that you forgot to turn it on.

Here we see Russell demonstrating the sophisticated art of "swinging the pole around until you finally find the cavity".

It's an…interesting endeavor. On the one hand, it’s an amazingly efficient way to see into cavities of various heights, often out in the middle of nowhere where you have to be able to carry the equipment for a long hike first. On the other hand, the poles are super bendy so you usually end up “fishing” with the camera at the top, trying to aim it precisely into the hole while the pole wobbles back and forth and the wind throws a wrench in everything…

Still, we’re doing it enough that we’ve certainly gotten much better at it. We go around scoping all of the active-use cavities for all of the groups (around 180 cavities total) about once a week. This has mostly been fruitless so far, but now we’re starting to find actual nests! Last Friday I found one with three eggs, and another with five; then I checked it again yesterday and found that the five-egg clutch stayed the same, and the three-egg clutch has grown to four. That tells us exactly when the four-egg one will hatch...and unfortunately means we have no idea about the five-egg one, so we'll just have to keep an eye on it. Since the birds pretty reliably lay one egg per day (all of the group’s females sharing the same nest), we can calculate from the final clutch size when we think the eggs will hatch. This will eventually be important because there’s a very narrow window when the chicks are big enough to put leg bands on them, but not old enough to fly away.

This is just some random tree down by Gate, but it's currently carpeted with flowers and looks like a fairy glade.

Aside from that (and some drama with getting new batteries for our equipment, but that's another story), we've mostly been trying to figure out where different bird groups are roosting so we can catch and band them before nesting really gets going. This involves going out at dusk, sitting really quietly for a while, and then watching and listening for where the birds are going--usually a particular cavity or two, which they'll all vanish into about ten minutes after sunset. This has also led me to discover one of my favorite "fun facts" at Hastings so far, which is that two groups that are particularly close to one another apparently have a tradition of spending ten minutes before bed each night...yelling at each other from neighboring trees. Hey, it's important to maintain good relationships with your neighbors, and remind them that they better stay really far away from your trees.

And actually, that leads me into my final story of the post. If you remember me mentioning it before, these birds have something called "power struggles", where a bunch of young birds fight for the chance to become high-ranking breeders. Something new that I learned this last week is that, like any war, a power struggle can also destabilize nearby groups and lead them to power-struggle as well! We had three different groups power-struggle in less than a week earlier--when you describe it, it ends up sounding like something out of a history group (or, again, Game of Thrones). The three younger females from 1600 went to take over at 1800, but their departure left 1600 unstable so then that exploded into its own power struggle, and then Middle Long Field 2 got tipped off as well and the three 1600-now-1800 females were fighting in that as well to maybe try to take over both territories...Now it's all settled out, but it was a lot of fun to track the changing power dynamics as they were happening!

I think I'll leave this post there. Time to make two week's worth of trail snacks so I survive the chaotic start to the nesting season!

Finally, the view from the top of Aardvark. That hilltop you can see on the left is Haystack.