The sentry’s calls brought immediate responses. Pretty soon the canyon was an echo chamber of noise, for if there was one thing the acorn woodpeckers liked it was a loud and lively family conference. They seemed ready to confer at any time from dawn to dusk, on any subject from soup to sunspots. At least that’s the impression a listener might get from their variety of noises and their range of pitch and volume. They talked to their relatives and friends and to the other species of birds who’d responded to the breakfast call, especially the scrub jays, their chief competitors for acorns, or in this case, doughnuts and bread. They also talked to themselves. Under ordinary circumstances this was done quietly, rather like a person muttering to himself while he tries to solve a personal problem. But there was one bird, a hot-headed male, whose soliloquies could be heard all the way to City Hall. He will be formally introduced later.
Breakfast was served on a corner of the porch railing, in a wooden dish that had once been a salad bowl. A large nail had been driven through the dish to keep it steady and to serve as a spear for two doughnuts. This left room for a couple of pieces of bread, broken into bits, and a few grapes when they were in season. I have never seen woodpeckers go after grapes on the vine — it would be difficult for them to find a proper landing place — but they ate them readily out of the wooden dish, frequently flying across the canyon to hide them behind the loose bark of a blue gum eucalyptus which also served as a hiding place for other choice tidbits. Remembering our little wine-making friend Richard the rat, I used to watch the woodpeckers carefully for signs of tippling. I never saw any. Either they ate the grapes before the process of fermentation started, or, more likely, they forgot about them since they invariably store much more food than they can possibly eat.
Nature has been generous to the acorn woodpecker. He is not dependent, as his relatives are, on the vagaries of insect life, nor is it necessary for him to fight for seeds or vegetation that are in short supply. Our part of California is filled with oaks and acorns, and living has been relatively easy for the woodpeckers dependent on them. Their abundance so testifies. Santa Barbara’s Christmas bird census always lists several hundred of them. In last year’s Christmas bird census Santa Barbara listed 456 — the highest count in the nation.
As soon as the sentry had issued the call for breakfast, he himself came down to the wooden dish to eat. I knew it was a male because he lacked the broad black forehead band that marks the female and is noticeable at a considerable distance. (For some reason this sexual dimorphism is not often mentioned in bird books.) I wasn’t sure whether it was the same male who acted as sentry all the time. On some mornings I noticed a decidedly pink cast to the normally whitish eye, which led me to believe that more than one male bird was involved. I still believe it — not, however, on this evidence. Dr. Mary Erickson, an ornithologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara who has been doing field work on these woodpeckers for a long time, tells me that this pinkish cast is not due to pigmentation but to a suffusion of blood caused by stress or excitement. She has observed it frequently in the eyes of woodpeckers who are being banded.
I knew from the sleekness and brightness of his coat that the sentry was an adult bird. Young birds often show dark eyes — perhaps because their pupils are expanded after time spent in the murkiness of the nest hole — and considerable red in the under-plumage of the chest, neck and head, a reminder of their close relationship with the red-headed woodpecker of the East and Midwest, Melanerpes erythrocephalus. The acorn woodpecker’s scientific name, Melanerpes formicivorus, meaning creeping black anteater, was based on inadequate or faulty information. Ants constitute such a small percentage of the diet that it seems likely they’re ingested by accident while the birds are eating acorns or other nuts and fruits.
The number of these woodpeckers feeding from the wooden dish varied according to the time of year. In spring and summer there were a great many — I didn’t attempt to count individual birds since this was impossible without banding; I simply kept track of how often they monopolized the feeder — and in the fall there were absolutely none. I used to think this was due to post-breeding dispersal, families splitting up and moving from one pole or tree to another pole or tree when the groups became too large and the quarters too unsanitary. These movements did occur every summer, but the birds never went far. When the family in the telephone pole beside our driveway moved, for instance, it was only to the large dead eucalyptus tree on the edge of the property. This location was no further away from the wooden dish than the other, yet in September the birds stopped coming. I would see them hurry past our porch railing as if it were a bird trap and doughnuts were poison bait and I a sinister stranger; I, who for months hadn’t been able to step out of a door without evoking a canyonful of clangorous “good mornings.”
It was as though our house had suddenly been declared off-limits. Perhaps a single woodpecker stopped for a rest, a quick grape or a bite of doughnut during that autumn and the early part of winter, but if he did, I failed to see him. No mere moving from one headquarters to another could account for such a complete reversal in behavior pattern. There had to be another explanation. And there was — staring at me from every twig of every coast live oak tree in the canyon. In September the acorns begin to ripen and fancy tidbits that can’t be properly stored must be forgotten in the interests of the future.
The group worked busily and harmoniously together. New holes were made in the storage tree, in this case a sycamore, and the acorns were pounded in, usually lengthwise, very occasionally sideways, if this was the way they could best be fitted in. I have seen a woodpecker try a particular acorn in a dozen or more different holes until one was found that was the exact fit, an essential part of the proceedings since the hole is intended to serve as a vise to hold the nut securely while they hammer the shells open with their beaks. Anyone skeptical about the skill and efficiency of these birds would do well to visit a storage tree and try to remove an acorn with his hands. Many ancient California Indian tribes, like the Chumash, Yokut and Shoshone, who shared the territory of these woodpeckers before the arrival of the Spaniards, undoubtedly obtained their method for cracking the nuts from watching the birds. The Indians used a hole in a rock instead of a tree, putting the acorns in securely, pointed end down, and hammering open the wider, exposed end. After the nuts were cured and ground, the tannic acid was removed with hot water and the meal was left to harden into cakes. A friend who has tasted one of these cakes, still made by the Yokuts, claims the Indians would have done better to have copied the woodpeckers entirely and eaten the acorns right out of the shell.
Every day when I passed Miss Holbrook’s small white cottage I could hear the woodpeckers at work. Sometimes I stopped to watch them drilling under the eaves as industriously as if the lady of the house was paying them carpenters’ union wages.
Work sessions were sometimes silent, sometimes accompanied by loud and spirited conversation which may have sounded to an untutored ear like quarreling. Actually they were good-natured, gregarious birds. For all their crowded living quarters and communal breeding — things which would have driven the human animal to distraction — I never saw them fight with each other. Although there appeared to be a pecking order at the wooden dish, it was maintained merely by a polite exchange of words: