Perspective: A Strange Way To Keep Safe
I’ve been watching a pair of yellow-bellied sapsuckers excavate a cavity in a dead white oak behind the shed. Since I’m home all the time, I can wander over and look at them whenever I feel like it, which is more often than you might expect. Sapsuckers, a kind of woodpecker, aren’t supposed to be here. They nest in northern Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Canada. In fact, according to the Wisconsin Breeding Bird Atlas, there has never been a confirmed nesting of yellow-bellied sapsuckers in my neck of Wisconsin. Yet here they are anyway, doing their thing in my dead oak. I guess they got lost and didn’t have a Bird Atlas. You can’t watch a woodpecker batter the trunk of a dead tree for very long without thinking about... brain trauma. I’m sure you’ve also wondered how woodpeckers sustain such head rattling without concussing themselves. My father-in-law used to say that woodpeckers could wrap their tongues around their brains to soften the blows. What an image! Without ever looking up, I