For flickers, looks can be deceiving

Date:  June 6, 2018

Source:  American Ornithological Society Publications Office

The North American woodpeckers known as "flickers" stand out for their distinctive wing and tail feathers of bright reds or yellows, and for their rampant interbreeding where these birds of different colors meet in the Great Plains. Despite the obvious visual differences between the Red-shafted Flicker of the west and the Yellow-shafted Flicker of the east, scientists have never before found genetic differences between them. A new study from The Auk: Ornithological Advances uses data from thousands of regions across the genome to distinguish these birds molecularly for the first time.

Stepfanie Aguillon and her colleagues at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology explored patterns across the genomes of these birds and find them to be incredibly similar at the molecular level. In spite of the strong similarity, they still have the ability to distinguish the western Red-shafted Flickers from the eastern Yellow-shafted Flickers for the first time through the use of new genomic methods. Genomic technology is advancing at such a rapid rate that genetic sequence differences that were undetectable in the 1980s using (then) cutting-edge methods are now readily apparent using next-generation sequencing techniques.

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Woodpeckers show signs of possible brain damage, but that might not be a bad thing

Date:  February 2, 2018

Source:  Field Museum

Summary:

With each peck, woodpeckers absorb more than ten times the force it would take to give a human a concussion. But they seem fine. Researchers examined the brains of woodpeckers in museum collections and saw that the brains showed a build-up of a protein that's a sign of brain damage in humans. The woodpeckers might not have sustained brain damage themselves, though -- the researchers think that protein build-up could possibly be beneficial to the birds.

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Endangered woodpeckers persist, but still struggle, on private land

January 24, 2018, American Ornithological Society

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service started the Safe Harbor program in North Carolina in 1995 to reduce conflict between landowners and conservation officials and to encourage private landowners to take steps to benefit endangered Red-cockaded Woodpeckers on their land. The program has successfully reduced conflict over conservation and reduced the abandonment of nest clusters, but a new study from The Condor: Ornithological Applications shows that while the program may have raised landowners' awareness of and tolerance for their feathered neighbors, it has largely failed to improve breeding success of birds on private lands.

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University's Jennifer Smith and her colleagues compared Red-cockaded Woodpeckers' breeding success on Safe Harbor properties before and after enrollment with that on control properties, monitoring a total of 55 breeding clusters in the North Carolina Sandhills between 1980 and 2014. Nest cluster abandonment increased on control properties while remaining constant and negligible on Safe Harbor properties, but other measures of breeding success such as clutch size, nest failure rates, and fledging success were unaffected by Safe Harbor habitat management efforts. These results suggest that the Safe Harbor program often failed to maintain or increase high-quality foraging habitat for the birds.

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Invasive plants dye woodpeckers red

Central Ornithology Publication Office

An ornithological mystery has been solved! Puzzling red feathers have been popping up in eastern North America's "yellow-shafted" population of Northern Flickers, but they aren't due to genes borrowed from their "red-shafted" cousins to the west, according to a new study in The Auk: Ornithological Advances. Instead, the culprit is a pigment that the birds are ingesting in the berries of exotic honeysuckle plants.

The Northern Flicker comes in two varieties--the birds of the west have a salmon pink or orange tinge to the undersides of their wings, while the eastern birds are yellow. Where the two populations meet in the middle, they frequently hybridize, producing birds with a blend of both colors. For years, however, flickers far to the east of the hybrid zone have been popping up with red-orange wing feathers. The prevailing explanation has been that they must somehow have genes from the western population, but Jocelyn Hudon of the Royal Alberta Museum and his colleagues have determined that the eastern birds' unusual color actually has a different source: a pigment called rhodoxanthin, which comes from the berries of two species of invasive honeysuckle plants.

Hudon and his colleagues used spectrophotometry and chromatography to show that rhodoxanthin, rather than the type of carotenoid pigment that colors western red-shafted birds, was present in the feathers of yellow-shafted flicker specimens with the aberrant red coloration. Data from a bird-banding station helped confirm that the birds acquire the red pigment during their fall molt about early August, which coincides with the availability of ripe honeysuckle berries. The honeysuckles have also been implicated as the source of unusual orange feathers in Cedar Waxwings.

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The miraculous reasons woodpeckers can slam their faces into trees all day and never get brain damage

Right now, over 200 species of woodpeckers around the world are slamming their faces into the side of a tree without a second thought of what this kind of behavior will do to their brains.

While this action would be entirely unnatural and extremely dangerous for humans, head banging is a crucial skill woodpeckers use to get food and make shelter.

Luckily for their tiny bird brains, woodpeckers are built for these types of powerful impacts.

Their brains, skulls, beaks, eyes, and even their bodies are specially designed to make the woodpecker nature's perfect head-banging machine.

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Deceptive woodpecker uses mimicry to avoid competition

Date: August 11, 2015

Source: Central Ornithology Publication Office

Summary: Birds of a feather may flock together, but that doesn't mean they share a genetic background. Though birds were first classified into groups primarily based on appearance, research demonstrates that this method isn't necessarily accurate: in a group of very similar-looking South American woodpecker species, genetic analysis has now shown one to be only a distant cousin of the others, in an intriguing case of visual mimicry.

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Emerald Ash Borer May Have Met Its Match

Dec. 18, 2013 — Woodpeckers find emerald ash borers a handy food source and may slow the spread of this noxious pest, even ultimately controlling it, suggest researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Their findings are published online in the journal Forest Ecology and Management.

"We found we have a native predator that is able to detect and respond to this new rich food resource," said Charles Flower, UIC postdoctoral research associate in biology and first author of the study.

Since the emerald ash borer was first found feeding on trees in southeastern Michigan in 2002, this Asian invader has been responsible for the death of 30 million trees in the northeastern U.S. and Canada. In Chicago, where the emerald ash borer is already destroying trees, 17 percent of the street trees are ash -- 85,000 trees, with an estimated 300,000 more ash trees on private property.

read on ...

Increase in US woodpecker populations linked to feasting on emerald ash borer

October 2013

The scourge of forests, the emerald ash borer (EAB), is usually described with words like ‘destructive’ and ‘pest’. A recent study based on data collected by citizen scientists suggests that one more adjective might apply (at least from a bird’s perspective): ‘delicious’.

In a study published this week in the journal Biological Invasions, U.S. Forest Service entomologist Andrew Liebhold and Cornell University scientist Walter Koenig and others document how an EAB invasion fuelled a population boom for four species of birds in the Detroit area.

The four species of birds considered in the study ‘Effects of the emerald ash borer invasion on four species of birds’ included three woodpeckers that are known to forage on EAB-infested ash trees – the downy woodpecker, hairy woodpecker, red-bellied woodpecker – as well as the white-breasted nuthatch, a common bark-gleaning species that is also a potential predator of EAB. All four species are cavity-nesters and also stand to benefit from an increase in nesting habitat as trees are killed by EAB. The release is available online at:www.nrs.fs.fed.us/pubs/43937.

“The emerald ash borer has been massively destructive because most North American ash trees have little or no defence against it,” Liebhold said. “We can take heart that native woodpecker species are clearly figuring out that EAB is edible, and this new and widely abundant food source appears to be enhancing their reproduction.”

Read on

Increase in Woodpecker Populations Linked to Feasting On Emerald Ash Borer

Aug. 8, 2013 — The scourge of forests, the emerald ash borer, or EAB, is usually described with words like "destructive" and "pest." A recent study based on data collected by citizen scientists suggests that one more adjective might apply, at least from a bird's perspective: "delicious."

In a study published this week in the journal Biological Invasions, U.S. Forest Service entomologist Andrew Liebhold and Cornell University scientist Walter Koenig and others document how an EAB invasion fueled a population boom for four species of birds in the Detroit area.

The four species of birds considered in the study "Effects of the emerald ash borer invasion on four species of birds" included three woodpeckers that are known to forage on EAB-infested ash trees -- the downy woodpecker, hairy woodpecker, red-bellied woodpecker -- as well as the white-breasted nuthatch, a common bark-gleaning species that is also a potential predator of EAB. All four species are cavity-nesters and also stand to benefit from an increase in nesting habitat as trees are killed by EAB.

"The emerald ash borer has been massively destructive because most North American ash trees have little or no defense against it," Liebhold said. "We can take heart that native woodpecker species are clearly figuring out that EAB is edible, and this new and widely abundant food source appears to be enhancing their reproduction."

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Protection considered for bird that needs wildfire

By JEFF BARNARD AP Environmental Writer

Posted:   04/08/2013 03:12:04 PM PDT

Updated:   04/08/2013 06:27:26 PM PDT

GRANTS PASS, Ore.—A woodpecker that depends on intense wildfires for the standing dead trees where it feeds on insects is being considered for protection under the Endangered Species Act.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Monday it will take a closer look at the black-backed woodpecker. A decision is due in a year but could take longer due to budget cuts.

Fish and Wildlife is considering two populations of the woodpecker—one inhabiting the Sierras of California and eastern Cascade Range of Oregon, and another in the Black Hills of South Dakota and Wyoming. Another Northern Rockies population is not under consideration.

The agency said conservation groups that petitioned to protect the birds presented substantial scientific information that they were suffering a loss of habitat because of fire suppression, salvage logging that removes fire-killed trees, and thinning to reduce the intensity of wildfires.

The decision is giving conservation groups hope the bird can force changes in national wildfire policy the same way the northern spotted owl overhauled the idea of logging old-growth forests.

Chad Hanson, staff ecologist of the John Muir Project of the Earth Island Institute, said the woodpecker has already figured in lawsuits to stop salvage logging.

"We hope as a result of this, the Forest Service will in fact not only pay more attention to species like this, but do a proactive job of educating people that when fire happens, it is not a bad thing, wildlife rely upon it," Hanson said. "These notions of catastrophic wildfire are really just politics and ignorance, and reflect outdated thinking."

Forest Service spokesman Larry Chambers said the agency's wildfire policy was not changing because the bird was not yet listed as a threatened or endangered species. He added that the agency already took "science-based actions to protect its habitat."

The agency has also said budget cuts this year will force it to let more fires burn—a prospect Hanson said would benefit the woodpecker and a broad range of species.

Continued:  http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_22981392/protection-considered-bird-that-needs-wildfire