Species Using Red-Cockaded Woodpecker Holes in Northeastern South Carolina

Abstract

The sticky resin of pine and other plant resins have occasionally been reported as having a damaging or nuisance effect upon birds and other animals.Brodkorb (1928) reported an example of a Yellow-shafted Flicker (Colapres auratus) losing its power of flight after contact with resin from a species of populus on the wings and tail.Ernest Cutts (pers.comm.)twice observed a dead bird stuck to the characteristic apron of resin that surrounds holes made by the Red-eoekaded Woodpecker (Dendrocopus borealis).In one instance the victim was an Eastern Bluebird (Sialia sialis) and in the other probably a Pine Warbler (Dendroica pinus).Dennis (19.69) reported that a house eat was apparently repelled by fresh resin at the entrance to a Yellow-shafted Flicker hole in a living white pine.On the whole plant resins, however fresh and sticky they may be, do not seem seriously to impede or harm higher forms of life. Even the "intentional" barriers of resin established byRedbreasted Nuthatches (Sitta cana, densis) and the Red-cockaded Woodpeckers about certain of their holes do not appear to be effective in keeping out most intruders.Rand (1959) suggests that in the Red-breasted Nuthatch the habit is an archaic trait that no longer serves a useful purpose.The nuthatch carries droplets of fresh resin in its bill to its nesting site and smears this material around the outside of the hole opening.The Red-cockaded Woodpecker, on the other hand, makes an elaborate network of diggings on the trunk, and sometimes the branches, of the living pine in which it makes its roosting and nesting holes.Each digging is roughly circular, about an inch in diameter, and penetrates into the sapwood.The pit that is formed exudes both sap and resin.Trunks of pines utilized by Red-cockaded Woodpeckers are commonly worked with resin pits for a distance of two or three feet above to five or ten feet below a hole opening.Diggings generally extend all the way around the trunk but are more concentrated on the face containing a hole opening.The resin that flows from such workings tends to congeal upon the tree trunk; some of it may splatter leaves and needles of nearby trees, and even the ground below a tree trunk may become heavily matted.Faces of neighboring pine trunks opposite hole openings are sometimes 79 BIRD-BANDING