Heeding woodpecker sensitivity

 I have been asked about uncommon sightings or behaviours of birds in the taman as well as the bukit observed during the series of Movement Control Orders since 2020.

And what immediately comes to mind is the spate of visible nestings within flow and reach of human traffic, most notably of the rufuous woodpeckers, and the ruby-cheeked sunbirds albeit unsuccessful, in bukit kiara during this period.

I believe these nestings which would have normally occurred away from prying human eyes, were out in the open simply because the surroundings concerned had been relatively quiet due to reduced human presence and the birds certainly were freer to choose their nesting locations, and we were lucky to spot them also due to heightened awareness among people of avian presence. 

The most recent is the common flameback woodpeckers in trk.  However, these birds are the second woodpecker species that I have observed to exhibit comparatively higher stress level than other woodpeckers (the other being the maroon woodpeckers) during nesting.

I believe that the parents could have abandoned the nest had there been such photography proximity (as happened during the feeding stage) during the earlier stage of  nest building, but for the feeding period the birds had been forced to endure the stress, its parental instinct and protection overtaking circumstances. 

And the female in particular displayed stress not just to both human and non-human presence but to any unnatural noise or movement.  As it happened an excavator deepening the adjacent riverbed halted its approach to feed its chick as it remained stationary for unusually long duration, a plane flying overhead had it fleeing into the foliage.

Its skittish or furtive behaviors like flight and hide well revealed its wariness and stress.The time spent before it approached its cavity nest would be longer and as expected not a direct flight approach. 

In fact, when the woodpeckers first started to work on the cavity nest, they would immediately flee when anyone approached, and they did often as the tree was right by the pathway with many walkers throughout the morning and after mid-afternoon till evening. The male was seen more often than the female during this period and perhaps this was why it was comparatively bolder than the female when feeding came as he did not display as much stress behaviour.

Nevertheless he would still linger on an adjacent branch for long before flying directly to the hole, and feeding still had to wait whilst it scanned its surrounding first.  On this occasion it was almost a full minute from the time he landed before he started to regurgitate to feed.

The female was even more wary as she wouldn't fly directly to the hole but feigned interest elsewhere.

I kept my distance, using a tree as camouflage but I guessed it was not enough for this hyper-sensitive bird as it looked like she spotted me.

Scanning and pretending to forage.

Doing the downward slide towards the nest, and by now it had been more than 10 minutes since she flew in with feed, and was still keeping away from the nest.

She didn't feed immediately even as she reached the nest whilst the poor chick could be heard calling away.

And finally regurgitating and into the cavity nest.

In between feeds, she continued to scan the surrounding.

And my final capture of this scene could not stress enough how important we need to keep our distance from this common flameback woodpecker as I could glean that she still had food in her beak but had to flee because somehow she was not at ease.

The same sideward movements before she actually fled.

My first sighting of the chick as the male parent flew off after feeding.

And I was told that this little one fledged successfully two days later.

What a relief!

I decided to conduct a little experiment to gauge the woodpeckers' sensitivity and had the opportunity when it was refining its cavity nest.

The actual intense building was in late March.

This internal excavation/refining took place about ten days later.

Both birds fled promptly when knew they were spotted.

The female looked more distressed.

Thereafter when I observed from a distance, the pair was seen in more relaxed and affectionate mode.

And for the record, this pair of common flameback woodpeckers was first spotted in late March to have chosen this cavity nest in a partially dead half-trunk with the male spending hours inside without emerging.

When the female came a-calling, and she's always the more vocal one often loudly announcing her arrival,  the pair would fly off together.  Then the male returned alone and disappeared into the cavity nest again.  In fact when the pair was not seen at all for a while I had thought that perhaps they had abandoned the nest.  But I came upon them again about 10 days later, and the male was seen excavating the hole from inside the trunk.  And thereafter the male was observed to enter the hole and not emerge for a couple of hours, and this went on for the rest of the month, and the long hours spent inside seemed to suggest incubation, with the male being the dominant ‘sitter’, suggesting incubation period of at least 21 days.

It turned out to be an accurate deduction as evidence of a chick was there when the male emerged with fecal sac in early May.

This chick grew fast with feeding mainly inside the cavity by both parents by the hour or less, and was soon out of the nest by the third week, so suggesting that it took the chick about 21 days to fledge.