Top Photo: Male catkins of hazel alder are in bloom and spreading their pollen.
February is the time for alder to reproduce. The yellow-green male catkins fertilize the red female flowers via airborne pollen. This stand of alder is on the north side of the museum’s wetlands.
Most woodpeckers make a living pounding their heads, via their long pointed bills, against wood. The activity is multi functional. They could be excavating a nest hole in spring, a winter roost, drumming for a mate, but most of the time they’re attempting to extract insects from the wood, beetle larvae and other insects within tree trunks, branches and limbs.
It’s been said that woodpeckers have some sort of shock absorbing device in their heads to lessen any damage that might be done to their brain while performing their 24/7 industry of pounding wood.
And indeed, woodpeckers don’t get concussions, at least from pecking wood. Do they have built in shock absorbers in the heads? Recent research indicates that this would lessen the impact of such activity, effectively softening the efficiency of each blow on the object they are pounding on. In other words, you don’t put a shock absorber on a hammer if you want to get the full effect of each blow.
Read about a study on this subject in Current Biology (Van Wassenbergh).
White-throated sparrows breed in the forests of Canada and north-eastern U. S. where they eat mainly insects and other invertebrates. Here, they hop along the forest floor foraging for seeds and fruit. They will linger here until mid May.
There are two forms of white-throated sparrow, those with white stripes or markings on their heads and those with tan stripes or markings on their heads. The “tan striped form” is pictured here.
They nest on the ground.
Switching over to fruit such as wax myrtle and even poison ivy berries when necessary during winter, yellow-rumped warblers eat mainly insects and other small invertebrates on their mature coniferous and mixed coniferous-deciduous breeding grounds further north and in the mountains of the west. They will be absent from our area by mid May.
There’s a lot going on outside. Don’t miss a minute of it!
Ranger Greg