Pennsylvania Game News - November 2018 - 63

before both birds flew off.
On another April day, I watched a
male sapsucker sipping sap from a huge
sugar maple. That tree had old and new
sapsucker holes, and he drilled more
as I watched. The flowing sap also fed
flies, but instead of eating them, he made
a quick dive to the ground, plucked up
an insect, and flew back to his original
perch.
He occasionally glanced at me as I sat
on the ground, 6 feet away, but he continued his drilling and sipping. The latter
he did by turning his head sideways and
dipping his beak into each hole two or
three times, touching the sticky bark with
only his feet and tailfeather tips.
The distinctive, irregular drumming
of a sapsucker is heard mostly on their
breeding grounds, as they defend their
territory and especially their sap-sucking
sites.
In Pennsylvania, they breed in northern-tier forests with 44 percent of our
state's estimated 96,000 birds in Warren,
McKean, Potter and Tioga counties.
Male drumming attracts the female,
and when she arrives, he leads her to his
previously selected nest site, wrote biologist Bernd Heinrich in his book One
Bird at a Time. They prefer trees with
hardwood decay fungus.
"If she approves, she lets him know
by offering token help, and then he begins excavating in earnest," Heinrich
wrote.
Sapsuckers are monogamous during
their breeding time and often from year
to year, because they frequently return
to the same breeding site, tree and cavity
as the previous year. A new nest cavity
takes a male two to three weeks to drill;
the entrance is a tight 1.5 inches and the
NOVEMBER 2018

cavity can be as deep as 10 inches.
The female lays five to seven white
eggs on a bed of wood chips left from
cavity construction. Both parents incubate with the male taking some daylight
hours, in addition to the night shift. After 10 to 13 days, the naked hatchlings
emerge. The parents take turns brooding
their young and feeding them insects, often coated in sap.
Nestlings are noisy, which can attract predators. Lawrence Kilham in his
Woodpeckers of Eastern North America
reported weasel predation in nests he observed in New Hampshire. Other predators include raccoons, snakes, red squirrels, hawks and black bears.
At 25 to 30 days old, the young fledge,
but continue to accompany their parents,
which feed them for a week and teach
them sapsucking.
The fledglings quickly learn to capture insects in the sap wells, but even
after they feed themselves, they remain
in vocal contact with their parents and
use their sap wells. About six weeks out
of the nest, they can drill their own sap
wells, but appear to stay in family groups
at least until migration.
Yellow-bellied sapsuckers have been
increasing throughout their range according to the 2011 Breeding Bird
Survey. In Pennsylvania, between the
first and second breeding bird atlasing,
yellow-bellied sapsucker breeding increased 99 percent, Scott H. Stoleson
reported in the Second Atlas of Breeding
Birds in Pennsylvania.
Although sapsuckers did not increase
in the Allegheny Mountains, where they
once bred, they filled in and expanded
in the northern, eastern and western sections of Pennsylvania.
This unique woodpecker now thrives
in Pennsylvania.
63

Pennsylvania Game News - November 2018

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Pennsylvania Game News - November 2018