THE 'HOLE' TRUTH REVEALED

Red-bellied Woodpecker - in Millie Page's back yard
Photo - courtesy,Sharon Milligan

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There is a tendency, in our throwaway society, to hold the hole in disfavor. Even after long and faithful service in the cause of comfort or convenience, the sock, the shoe and the bucket go the way of all trash.

Few of us remember that socks used to be darned, and a hole in a shoe was only a temporary setback to be met with the thickest piece of cardboard one could find. We'd replace the cardboard on rainy days, and do our own shoe repair with glue-on rubber soles that flapped all the way to school. As long as it held together, holes notwithstanding, the old shoe had value.

Trees are like that. A tree with a hole in it is an important piece of real estate, marketable to a wide variety of birds and other wildlife. Should the tree be leafless, and to all appearances, dead and useless, its market value even increases to birds looking for domicile.

Unfortunately, a tree with a hole in it sooner or later suffers the same fate as old socks and buckets. Somehow it is an affront to suburbia to leave undisturbed a dead and unsightly totem of holes and gnarls; and so it goes, unceremoniously. Only then do we discover a handful of baby Screech Owls left homeless, or the eggs of the Red-headed Woodpecker, she who lends such splash to the neighborhood.

The rush to remove dead trees is not just a backyard phenomenon. For a long time, land-use managers conscripted old trees for ignoble ends, and indiscriminate land-clearing practices give little heed to the wildlife dislocation that ensues. Hole-nesting birds have become a major concern to wildlife experts because housing is in short supply.

Trees have two kinds of holes that supply the housing needs of birds. There are the natural cavities which see long life and a great variety of tenants, and there are holes deliberately excavated by woodpeckers and also used in successive years by opportunistic birds who lack the tools to excavate their own holes.

Woodpeckers are uniquely endowed to chisel a hole in a tree. Not only are their bills sharp and pointed for ease in rat-a-tat-tatting, but their skulls are thick enough to absorb the punishment without serious impairment of their senses.

Woodpeckers come equipped with their own scaffolding: Strong feet and claws (two forward and two backward) for clinging, and stiff spiny tails for propping and balance. Virtually all of our woodpeckers use a new hole each year. This seeming overindulgence in new housing each year is not without benefit to another group of birds who make minor renovations, add a few leaves, bits of string, a tuft of fur, and call it home for the duration of the nesting season.

Recycling of old nesting cavities is one of the ways birds cope with shortages. What last year was home for a family of Pileated Woodpeckers could be this year's Screech Owl nest. That flicker hole next year may be reclaimed by a Tufted Titmouse, the year after, by a chickadee.

Competition is keen and better understood when one ponders the inevitable fact that birds cannot become parents until they have made or otherwise acquired, a place to lay eggs.

Among the birds that tend to nest in natural cavities but are not above exerting squatter's rights on woodpecker holes are the Wood Duck, American Kestrel, Great Crested Flycatcher, Brown-headed Nuthatch, Carolina Wren and, to the woe of almost all native cavity nesting species, the European Starling and the House Sparrow.

Purple Martins, famed for their mosquito control, and amply rewarded with man-made condos, were at one time confined to nesting in cavities, hollows in cliffs and old woodpecker holes. American Indians set the current trend in martin housing by hanging gourds, or calabashes, in their villages. Even now, those, in some of the more remote sections of our coastal counties, I find martins far from human habitation and suspect that the old instincts still exit.

That most famous of cavity nesters, the Eastern Bluebird, showed signs of succumbing to the housing pinch before man laid out the first of the many bluebird trails which today are fostering healthy bluebird populations in rural areas.

Prothonotary Warblers, of the brilliant hue and ascending song, are the only cavity-nesting warlbers in the eastern U.S., and while preferring an upturned tree in a quiet swamp, may look upon the abandoned home of a Downy Woodpecker as the ultimate in cozy living.

Any number of rodents and mammals make use of old woodpecker holes, and just recently I came upon a pair of American Kestrels in great distress as they found that their staked-out old Pileated Woodpecker hole had been occupied by a swarm of bees.

While substitute housing, such as gourds and bird-houses may please the few, such as martins and bluebirds, there always will be birds for which an ancient skeleton of a once verdant tree means the difference between dynamic populations or none at all. We should try to remember that.

This article was published in May 1982