AUTUMN 1998/VOLUME 12, NUMBER 4

Project FeederWatch
Become A Member

Woodpecker Central
By Margaret Barker

Please cite this Page as:
Barker, M. 1998.  Woodpecker Central.   Birdscope, Volume 12, Number 4:  8.

FeederWatcher Spots Lewis's Woodpecker
in New York's Adirondack Mountains

Imagine more than 200 people coming to your FeederWatch Count Site to see a woodpecker. "We had a great time," says FeederWatcher Linda Hoyt, who welcomed birders from across the Northeast to her yard for 13 days last November to see a juvenile Lewis’s Woodpecker--a rare bird for Linda’s neck of the woods: Brant Lake, New York, a tiny town on the eastern edge of the Adirondacks.

"I was headed upstairs to do a few morning errands when I glanced at the feeder, took one or two steps up, and then went, ‘Whoa!’" Hoyt backed down the steps and spent the day observing the strange bird scarfing up black-oil sunflower seeds at her platform feeder. Carefully looking at its mottled gray plumage with a dark pink wash across the breast, she identified it as a Lewis’s Woodpecker, a species that usually calls west of the Rockies home. She confirmed her sighting with other birders, and word began to spread.

"I stuck a homemade sign with the silhouette of a Lewis’s Woodpecker in a snow bank at the end of our driveway to let birders know they had the right place," says Hoyt, and soon she could predict when and where people might see the bird. Within a few days, the woodpecker developed its own routine: it would pop out of its favorite roosting hole in an aging maple in Hoyt’s yard, fly to an old apple tree, swoop down to the platform feeder--first bird of the day--and begin its morning feast. It often dive-bombed other birds and made quick, short trips to cache food in the maple and apple trees. At 4:00 p.m. each afternoon, it would fly to its maple tree hole, sit inside with its head sticking out for about 20 minutes, and then disappear inside the roost.

Hoyt says she last saw the bird on November 29, 1997. It went to its roosting hole a little early, about 3:45 p.m., and kept its head poked out until about 4:25 p.m. The next day a group of excited birders came by for a look, but the bird was nowhere to be seen. Hoyt is happy she avoided that common FeederWatcher’s lament of observing a great bird only on a noncount day. She actually saw the woodpecker on two FeederWatch Count Days. So, this particular Lewis’s Woodpecker is part of the 1997-98 FeederWatch record.

Return