Preparing to co-lead a walk for the Island Heritage Trust, I took an afternoon hike through the Barred Island Preserve. This trail is like a really nice restaurant meal. The appetizer and main courses are excellent, but it’s really the dessert that you look forward to. In the case of the trail, you walk through a beautiful boreal forest of spruce, fir and pine, blanketed with rich tapestry of mosses and lichen, and at its end emerge on a sand bar that connects to the eponymous island — when the tide is low. At high tide, the bar is completely submerged. But at any tide, that piece of coast is a treat, with lots of sea birds, osprey, eagles and even jellyfish when summer arrives.
I wouldn’t make it to the island on this visit, as I wanted to get a sneak peek at what the hikers would be seeing on the following week’s walk. Among other finds, which I will post about later, I heard the irregular drum beats of a nearby woodpecker. I never really got a good look at it through the conifer stands that lined the trail, but woodpeckers are pretty common here on the island, so I moved on. A little bit later, I came across a downed birch tree shown in the image above. Being new to this naturalist business, I was struck by the regularity of the square and rectangular borings that went up and down this decaying log, as well as a few adjacent ones. They were so unlike the cavities I had seen in some standing trees that I had to wonder about their maker.
When I got home, I did a little research and learned that vertically oriented rectangular holes, or slots, are the signature of the pileated woodpecker. The 2-3 inch rectangles are created by the pileated’s disciplined search for insects, especially carpenter ants, that have gotten into the decaying heartwood of trees. While downy woodpeckers, which are also residents of our island, create similarly shaped holes, they are smaller in size. In both cases, white birch is a frequent target because it is prone to heart rot, making it a prime real estate for carpenter ant colonies once the tree is stressed or downed.
I didn’t have any photos of a pileated to share, so I visited iNaturalist. To my surprise, I learned that a very experienced birder in Deer Isle, Nathaniel Sharp, had been on the Barred Island Trail a day earlier and had captured some amazing pictures of an American Three-Toed woodpecker — a very, very rare visitor. A few days later I met a birder who had driven up from Connecticut just to get this bird on her life list.
Almanac
Today’s Forecast: Partly cloudy conditions expected around 5PM. The lowest Feels Like temperature will be 18° around 9AM.
| Weather | ||
|---|---|---|
| Low Temperature: 32 | High Temperature: 38 | Precipitation (in): 0 |
| Wind Direction: ENE | Max Wind (mph): 19 | |
| Sunrise: 6:12 | Sunset: 7:03 | |
| Lunar Phase: Full | Days to Next Full: 29 |
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