- #1
physics girl phd
- 931
- 3
This afternoon a red-bellied woodpecker that had visiting our suet feeder slammed into one of our windows at high speed and broke her neck. I ran to the window and only to see her take her last few breaths, and half-hearted flaps of wings and tail (she was on her back), then lay her head down, and close her eyes. Now I'm just not sure about my multiple bird feeders anymore.
She was just so beautiful and so much smaller than she looked when on our feeder (red-bellies are the largest of all three types we've been getting -- downy, hairy, and red-bellied). She may have been a juvenile, because her red wasn't very bright. I'm pretty crushed up inside (crying now).
I went outside and held her for a second in a gloved hand, then I quickly called the local nature center to see if they wanted it (since she was so freshly dead, looked to have no parasites, etc.), but they didn't. I looked up the avian professors in biology and the vet school, but nobody looked to have any interest in woodpeckers, and it was already nearing 5 pm. By the time I got back to her, the ants were starting to go to work on her anyways, so I moved her to an elevated spot of ivy behind our house for nature to take its course.
E (nearly 2) showed remarkable intuition, based on my actions and emotions of course. She hugged me and said "mommy woodpecker carry" and "woodpecker bye-bye" when I carried it away from our front porch and then returned inside to hug her. It's probably the first death she's really encountered (I don't think she's even noticed a dead bug). We were snacking at the table at the time of the impact, and I had to get her down and wash her hands before I could go outside (so she didn't SEE it die, but heard me getting upset when I jumped up to the window while she was still strapped in her chair).
...Much better intuition than my spouse, who doesn't even want to talk about it. Sometimes his post-traumatic stress syndrome is just too much for me. In processing it, I tried to tell him about her tongue: I'd never seen a woodpecker's tongue before, and it was a most amazing thing... but he didn't want to hear anything. I swear, if I didn't know he had post-traumatic stress issues, I'd swear he felt nothing. Which is why I have to vent about her here. Because i have to get it out.
I hate to take the feeders down; little E is learning all her birds, they are good "cat TV" for our indoor cats... but now the feeders seemed tainted. I know that perhaps a lot of the birds (and the squirrels) are healthier because I'm offering a variety of food but this seems even worse than the occasional squirrel being taken out by one of the two lurking neighborhood "white kitties." We also don't have another really good tree at which to hang them (both in terms of just physically hanging the feeders, and definitely in terms of visibility).
And this was a red-bellied! We hung the feeder to attract a red-bellied who'd been building a hole a tree across the street (and to keep the persistent downy that had been using the regular feeder).. and during the day we have a constant line-up of different woodpeckers waiting to get at the suet (there is definitely hierarchy, but the lowly downy ones will spar each other).