Sap seekers

Red-what’d what? Red-naped sapsucker? What is a red-naped sapsucker, anyway? What is a “nape?” And “sapsucker” sounds rather derogatory.

Well, it’s a bird – the sapsucker is a bird. In fact, it’s a woodpecker. It’s a woodpecker that’s found in Kootenai County. It’s a sap-sucking woodpecker. But the name still sounds bad. And a nape, I guess, is the back of the neck. “Red” I already understood.

So, it’s a sap-sucking woodpecker with a red neck that lives around here. Wow, they could have named it the “red-neck sapsucker.” Now, there’s a name for a North Idaho bird!

Want more? Well, the red-naped sapsucker is closely related to the yellow-bellied sapsucker. Does that help? No, you thought that was just a phrase that bullies used in yelling at skinny kids?

There’s also a red-breasted sapsucker. And, finally, there’s the beautiful, but plainly named, Williamson’s sapsucker – my apologies to the Williamsons, but what kind of name is that for the cousin of the yellow-bellied, red-breasted and red-naped sapsuckers?

Obviously three of the four names are meant to be descriptive, but it all gets quite confusing. Williamson’s is somewhat straight forward. The male is basically black and white, with a little red and yellow. It could be called the “black-backed sapsucker,” except that there’s already a “black-backed woodpecker.”

The female, however, is so different in appearance that the two sexes were considered as two separate species for more than 20 years in the late 1800s. Finally someone noticed the two together at a nest and figured it out. So I guess that “Williamson’s” isn’t so bad after all.

But here is where the names get tricky. The “yellow-bellied” is yellow-bellied, but so are the two “red-” sapsuckers. The red-breasted could be more appropriately called the “red-headed sapsucker,” but that’s too close to “red-headed woodpecker” – of which there already is one. Remember “Woody?”

But our red-naped is the most confusing of all. As I mentioned, it too has a yellow belly. It also has a black breast, as does the yellow-bellied. And males of both species have red throats, black and white stripes on their faces, and red foreheads. Both females may have varying degrees of white on their chins.

From the front, the two species are almost identical. The male red-naped does have more red and less black on its throat, but a female red-naped, having just a little white on its chin, looks very much like a male yellow-bellied. Confused yet?

It all comes down to the red nape of the red-naped. I won’t mention that female red-napes often have white napes and male yellow-bellies, which have white napes, sometimes have red napes. That would make it even more confusing.

Actually, it is so confusing that for 125 years ornithologists considered the three hyphenated sapsuckers to be just one species – the yellow-bellied sapsucker. Where ranges overlap there is a small amount of hybridization, but genetically the three are quite distinct and have been considered separate species for 20 years.

OK, now that we have that cleared up, I still have a problem with the family name of this group – the sapsuckers. Sapsucker is a misnomer. Sapsuckers do eat sap, and lots of it – up to 20 percent of their diet is sap. However, sucking is something one does with a straw. Some hummingbirds suck through a strawlike tongue.

But sapsuckers do not have a strawlike tongue. They have a brushlike tongue. They actually lick the sap. They are saplickers. This whole group needs a complete overhaul of its naming structure. They are the “saplickers.”

I’m OK with Williamson’s saplicker, and red-breasted saplicker would be fine, but the other two have got to change. The red-naped could be the “mostly-red-naped saplicker,” and the yellow-bellied could be the “mostly-white-naped saplicker.” That’s still confusing.

Well, the yellow-bellied, at least in the United States, is an eastern species. It does breed in western Canada and gets as close to us as southern Alberta, but we’ll not consider that for now. The red-naped is a Rocky Mountain and Great Basin species in the breeding season, and a Southwest United States to Central Mexico species in the winter.

Since both species have a yellow belly, and since “yellow-bellied” is the oldest name for the group, how about we rename them the “eastern yellow-bellied saplicker” and the “western yellow-bellied saplicker?” Forget about the napes!

I guess that I shouldn’t get so wrapped up in the names. Whether sapsucker or saplicker, the name describes a most unusual behavior for a woodpecker.

These four sapsucker species are very unique in their feeding strategy. While most woodpeckers use their pecking abilities to find insects in and under bark, sapsuckers peck to drill holes through the dead bark to the living part of the tree where the sap flows.

With a technique they must have learned from the early New England settlers who tapped maple trees to make syrup, sapsuckers tap trees by making lots of small wells in the bark. From these wells they harvest both sap and the insects that are attracted to the sap.

Wells are neatly drilled in concentric circles around smaller trees, or in long vertical rows in larger trees. A single bird may drill as many as 20 new wells in a day while still servicing all the older wells – eating the accumulated sap and bugs.

All this well-drilling activity has two other consequences. The first is that the sap and bugs make good eating for other creatures, both feathered and furred. Hummingbirds and warblers may actually nest near drilled trees to take advantage of the sapsucker’s unique idea. Other, less ingenious woodpecker species have to be driven away. Chipmunks and squirrels may feed there, too.

The other consequence of its hard work is the ire of tree-loving humans. Although the neatness in the pattern of sapsucker holes is beauty to me, it can be disfigurement and death to the tree. Thus sapsuckers are not welcome inhabitants of orchards, commercial timber stands, or suburban landscapes.

In addition to feeding at the wells, sapsuckers are proficient at the more traditional forms of woodpecker foraging – the gleaning of insects from bark, and are quite good at flycatching – flying out to capture specific bugs spotted from a perch. They also readily devour fruit when available.

But it’s the use of the wells that sets this group apart, and their use of them is a lot more complex than one might imagine. In the spring, before the sap is flowing, sapsuckers actually eat the green, living layer just under the bark, the cambium.

As the season progresses, they adjust the depth and diameter of the wells – depending upon their target harvest of cambium, sap, or insects. And they really enjoy their work. Sapsuckers have actually been seen dipping bugs in the sap prior to consuming them. That’s classy! I wonder if they daintily raise one claw as they take a nibble.

They might. They are described as rather delicate woodpeckers. Also quiet and retiring. Think of how raucous a flicker or pileated woodpecker can be, or even how shrill a tiny downy woodpecker sounds. Sapsucker calls are described as plaintive, weak, and with catlike mewing. Most of the time they are just silent.

Silent in voice, that is. Sapsuckers are the jazz musicians of the woodpeckers when it comes to drumming on tree trunks. Their thumps and taps are routinely described as rhythmic.

There are rapid beats, followed by slow beats. There is staccato drumming. Males and females practice drumming duets while courting. They trade patterns of ritual tapping at the nest cavity hole.

They can’t sing, but they’ve got rhythm! And that’s fine with me. My favorite part of Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” was the 15 minute drum solo.

So, where does one go to find these odd little woodpeckers? Around here, red-naped sapsuckers are found in just about any forest that has mature stands of aspen. Aspen is a red-nape’s favorite tree. In Oregon, a nesting study found that over 90 percent of the red-napes were nesting in aspen trees.

And not just any old aspen – actually they do need to be old to be large enough. Sapsuckers excavate a 4-inch diameter, 8-inch deep cavity, often 20 or more feet off the ground. That requires a big tree. It also requires a sick tree.

Red-napes favor aspen with a fungal disease that rots out the center of the tree while leaving the outer layers strong. The effects of the disease, as do the nest cavities of sequential years, start low on the tree and move up in time. Thus a good, sick tree will have numerous sapsucker nesting holes, with the newest closest to the top.

Both parents excavate the cavity, and that’s home for the summer. There are no grasses, mosses or feathers to line the nest – just a few wood chips in the bottom. And who knows if that’s by design, or a result of messy construction?

Both parents incubate the eggs, feed the nestlings, and teach the fledglings how to create wells and lick sap. And the young saplickers are highly motivated from the start. They have not only grown up on the typical insect diet of other woodpecker nestlings, but they have dipped from their parents’ wells, so to speak. The adult birds harvest sap that they carry back to the nest in their crops, the part of a bird’s stomach used as a storage device.

Once they learn the tricks of the trade, the young are on their own. That’s what’s going on now at sapsucker cavities all over the mixed forests of North Idaho. The cavities are being left to new inhabitants – those opportunistic animals that like dens or nest cavities, but can’t build their own.

And then the red-naped sapsuckers do one last odd thing for a woodpecker to do. Either singly, or in small groups, they migrate south. Yellow-bellied sapsuckers in western Canada, only a few hundred miles from our red-napes, migrate southeast, avoiding the Great Plains, to the southeastern states.

But our sapsuckers have warmer climes in mind. A few will stop off in southern Arizona, but most, just as do a number of our human summer visitors, will spend the winter in the warmth of Mexico.

After all, any old New Englander will tell you that “the sap don’t flow too good when it gets too cold.” And you know what happens if you put your tongue on a frozen well.