Mistletoe Winter by Roy Dennis

Author:Roy Dennis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Saraband
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Nature’s woodworkers

The simplest things, which all of us can see whenever we walk through woodland, can tell us the biggest things about evolution on our planet. Take woodpecker holes. Just as a woodworker might select the right drill bit for a particular job, nature provides a range of different sized woodpeckers, making different sized holes in trees. At one end of the scale in Europe are the tiny lesser spotted woodpeckers, making holes of just three centimetres in diameter, while large black woodpeckers have a nest hole of more than three times that in diameter. I’m not sure that you can talk about altruism in the animal world, but someone should tell the woodpeckers how special they are as a keystone species.

There used to be a distinctive clump of dead Scots pine trees near where I lived in Abernethy Forest in the Scottish Highlands. I think they had died because a little river nearby had become blocked, the water spreading out to create a small marsh around their bases, finally killing them. They reminded me of similar clumps of dead trees in beaver-dammed ponds elsewhere. Looking across the hundred metres or so to this group of trees, it was clear that the trees were dotted with great spotted woodpecker nest holes. This is a species once thought to be extinct in Scotland, a note in the Victorian-era bird books suggesting that there may have been just a tiny population of less than a handful of pairs hanging on in that very same Abernethy Forest. But things have changed since then.

These present-day holes were always worth a look in spring and early summer, for as well as finding young woodpeckers calling loudly from their nest, I could discover one or two of the old holes being used for breeding by swifts. It was absolutely lovely to watch and hear them dashing through the open forest and across the bogs, swooping up and into one of the old holes. Twice in the 1970s, a very rare breeding species called the wryneck also chose to live there, for they like to lay their eggs in vacant woodpecker holes. One year there was just a single male perching at the very top of the dead trees, incessantly giving its ‘pee-pee-pee’ call, while in another year a pair of wryneck nested.

Before swifts lived in the roofs of our buildings and became a familiar sight in towns and villages, their original haunts would have been holes in trees, often excavated by woodpeckers. Many years ago, when the famous cameraman Hugh Miles was making a film with the RSPB on the birds of the native pinewood, he was filming, from his hide, a pair of great spotted woodpeckers feeding their young in a nest hole in the same forest. Their red-topped heads stuck out, waiting for the food-carrying parents, and what a noise they made! He filmed on the day that the young woodpeckers fledged and left their nest chamber, and was amazed that, within very little time at all, a pair of swifts flew down and dived into the hole.

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