Naturalist Notebook: A Sapsucker Nest Revealed and a Winking Star

A wild thing happened to a snag in the Gateway Park beaver pond. We might not have noticed, the birding regulars and I on our rain-smeared February walk. Snags of every size and shape litter the pond; parts of them are always dangling and falling. But this was a snag we’ve had our eyes on.

It projects from the water just above the dam. Two springs ago, we had the rare treat of watching a pair of red-breasted sapsuckers make chips fly from a hole toward the top of the snag. They worked without qualm as we gawked, although sapsuckers are the shiest of our five woodpecker species. In subsequent months, we watched them bring insects into the nest hole.

Now the snag had lost its top, and it split in such a way that the nest was revealed in perfect cross-section. We could see the narrow entrance hole and how it widened when it turned downward into the heart of the tree, forming a pocket a foot deep. Maybe deeper. At the bottom, matted wood chips and grass still bore the imprint of downy bottoms. 

Maybe it’s not such a wild thing for a tree to split where a large cavity has been bored into its center. Still, to see the nest revealed via gutting, a former home soon to be scoured clean by rain, brought on one of those head rushes of time and its passage that leaves your spirit feeling about as drenched as my body was getting. A feeling that time is irrevocable. A feeling that sounds cheesy when you later recount it in your journal, but your journal has not been out here, month after month, for years, slowing down to watch the snag and catch a glimpse of what might emerge from its hole.

The spring following the sapsuckers’ residence, we saw northern flickers coming in and out of the hole. Sapsuckers, like most woodpeckers, make a new nest every year. Flickers are one of the few woodpeckers not too proud to use a hole built by another bird.

All around the pond, songbirds nest in holes begun by woodpeckers. Chickadees, nuthatches, tree swallows, violet-green swallows, starlings. These so-called secondary cavity nesters are dependent on woodpeckers, which in turn are dependent on a steady supply of dead or dying trees and all the insects they host. Cleaning your forest of dead trees is a good way to cripple your land’s community of life.

Most owls are secondary cavity nesters. Great horned owls are far too big for woodpecker holes and must either find the gaping cavity where a large branch has ripped out of a tree’s trunk and been followed by a decade or two of fortuitous heart rot, or else spot an abandoned red-tailed hawk’s nest, which they will commandeer and reuse year after year.

Talk about slow birding, or slow development of good bird life. All these critters rely on the right stages of disintegration. It makes me think of the stump sprouters: plants that grow especially well atop rotting stumps, notably red huckleberry and western hemlock. Stumps store water well, are full of ready nutrients, likely hold fungal or microbial secrets of which the stump sprouters are well aware, and give a boost above competing vegetation and browsing deer. 

One of the largest trees in terms of girth on the peninsula, a Douglas-fir at Penrose Point State Park, has both species of huckleberry sprouting from its bark. They are not waiting for the tree to reach stumphood. The tree is old enough that its outer bark has grown soft, with soil-like pockets, and hosts insect communities and visiting woodpeckers.

The Gateway Park pond, with its tangles of bushes and snags, is like the Key Peninsula — a place where it is so dang easy to hide. You have to be patient if you want to see the ducks that are almost always there. It took us many visits to realize that two special species of duck hang around all summer: wood ducks and hooded mergansers.

Both have a legitimate claim as the most strikingly beautiful duck in North America, and both nest in tree cavities. The chicks leap from the tree within days of hatching, long before they can fly. Even in natural areas, it is so rare to find a suitably large nest cavity near water that these two ducks are known to dump their eggs in one another’s nests and hope that the lucky mothers who won the nest sites can care for the resulting large mixed broods.

We have yet to find their nests. There is no shortage of tree-sized reminders here that nothing is fixed. Things dying, then being hacked apart, then hosting eggs and more eggs, then falling to pieces. 

So at night I’ve been looking to the stars, learning constellations. I’ve been enjoying the company of Perseus, high overhead after dusk, in the region of the sky between Cassiopeia and Orion. 

But even the stars, supposedly motionless while the moon and planets wander the ecliptic, are on journeys of their own. Perseus contains the star Algol. Every 2.86 days, Algol dims for several hours, turning from the second-brightest star in Perseus to one of its fainter stars. For this behavior, a cosmic wink, it is known as the Demon Star or the Prankster Star. It is actually three stars that appear as one, and the regular fade-out happens because one star eclipses the others. 

To discover such things, you must be patient. You must know the terrain of the constellation and recognize when a component dims. Time, a prankster itself, laughs at our notions of constancy. Every star right now is zooming through space, on some tangent to us. Over the millennia, the constellations distort and shift. 

Arcturus, the bright reddish star in the constellation Bootes (the herdsman), is one of the fastest-moving at 270,000 miles per hour relative to our sun. Every 1,600 years, it moves by one degree across the sky, about two full moon widths.

Even the pole star, Polaris, the one star that does not rotate over the course of a night, changes over time. In 12,000 years, Vega will be the pole star. In his wonderful book, “The Stars: A New Way to See Them,” H.A. Rey (of Curious George fame) wrote, “Stargazing will then be easy, with a pivotal star as brilliant as that.”

For a while, anyway.