Nooks and crannies

Meadow Farm, an off-the-grid neo-homestead and locally beloved place, has long hosted a wild bird feeding station in one form or another.  When two housemates and I lived there for several months in 2016, I enjoyed building a few feeders, filling them with black oil sunflower seed, and watching the ensuing "bird TV."  At that time, a curious quirk in some of the birds' feeding habits caught my attention.  I recently returned to find out if it was still "a thing."

Much of the bird activity there centers around a small tree just outside the bank of dining room windows.  It's a convenient place to hang feeders and a comfortable staging area for hungry feeder visitors.  Here's the tree just the other day, with my friend Klaus, who's currently living at the farm:

Before heading outside to take the photos in this post, Klaus and I sat inside and watched the feeders for a little while.  Sure enough, we saw a downy woodpecker and a white-breasted nuthatch doing just what I remembered these species doing at the feeders in 2016.  They had a special relationship with the feeder tree -- one that enabled them easily and fully to exploit the sunflower seed resource being offered to them.

If you look closely at the trunk of the tree,  you'll see a little hollow in the bark:

Now look closer:

Yep, that's the hull of a sunflower seed.  You might also notice little whitish bits of debris -- crumbs of sunflower seed left behind from many a meal eaten here.

As Klaus and I watched from inside, a downy woodpecker collected a seed from one of the feeders, flew to the trunk of the tree, and promptly scooted over to this little hollow.  It deposited the seed here, then proceeded to whack away at it with its bill until the seed hull cracked open, revealing the good stuff within.  The downy gobbled up the tasty "meat" and then returned to the feeder for another seed.

We saw this woodpecker make similar use of another little divet in the bark, a little higher on the tree, above where the trunk forks.  At this place on the tree, our clever woodpecker actually had its choice of three or four such spots:

Here's a closeup of one of them, littered with seed crumbs and pieces of hull:

And another, this one with a leftover hull that someone pecked open just enough to extract the meat:

On a different limb of the tree, a white-breasted nuthatch found a similar hollow.

Because of the shape of this cavity, and the way the bird placed the seed in it, the bird was able to open the seed by pecking at it from two different sides, positioning itself first to the right of the cavity, then to the left, and so on, wham-wham-whamming until the task was accomplished.

We human observers were impressed.  It was fun then to go out to the tree and inspect these nooks, noticing the details that indicated how well they were used.  You know the look and feel of a well-used piece of wood?  Polished by the touch and grip of thousands of hands?

(The less used post, at right, just isn't the same).  Well, the birds' bark-hollows had a similar look.  It seemed to me they'd been used this way for a long time.

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Birds employ different strategies for opening seeds.  Grosbeaks and finches, with their thick, powerful beaks, simply crush the hulls -- as we do with our molars, when feasting on those salty jumbo sunflower seeds.  (If you closely watch a cardinal, for instance, you can even see it manipulate the crushed seed with its tongue to separate the meat from the hull.)  Chickadees and titmice place a seed snugly between their feet on a perch, and hammer at it there until the hull splits open.  But woodpeckers and nuthatches aren't equipped for either of these methods.  As we saw at Meadow Farm, they do something else -- and certainly it doesn't always involve a favorite divet used over and over.  Presumably, just about any crevice will do.  But next time you're watching these birds at your feeder, try to see where they go with their seeds.  I'd be interested to know if your downies and nuthatches, too, have particular places they like to eat!

And if they do -- if this is a widespread practice -- we might be tempted to label it tool use.  Since Jane Goodall's 1960 discovery that chimpanzees "fish" for termites with twigs and blades of grass, biologists have known that humans aren't the only tool users.  Many animals are now recognized for their ability to manipulate objects from their environment to gather food or accomplish other tasks.  May we call a bark-hollow such a tool?  It's not really something you can grasp, or wield, or move.  But there's something special about it.  The birds have a relationship with it.  They go to it.  They use it repeatedly.  They appear to have shaped it -- by smoothing it, and perhaps, over time, by widening or deepening it.  And without them, it would not be used in the way it is.

To me, there is a sense that, in a small way, the downies and nuthatches have sanctified that Meadow Farm feeder tree with their habits.  They have made it unique, and that uniqueness is relational: defined in and by community, where, we might argue, sacredness always dwells.  Life is always inspiring us and challenging us with its depth and breadth of relationship.  It touches everything -- and everything is changed forever as a result.

I pray that we may feel with our hearts these changes, big and small -- and know them as signposts of the Spirit in things.

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NOTES

Credit is due to friends Lee and Lindy for introducing to me the phrase "bird TV."