Subject: Re: flickers
Date: Nov 21 15:43:34 1994
From: Dennis Paulson - dpaulson at ups.edu


I do have one more comment on flicker intergrades. The red nape typical of
yellow-shafted is *very* common in this area, occurring in many birds that
otherwise look like typical red-shafted. I take it that that
characteristic, while it may have been restricted to yellow-shafted
populations, has now permeated western populations in a big way and may not
even indicate recent hybrid origin; many of our breeding birds have it to
some extent. I have seen mixed red and black malar stripes several times
and birds with both red and yellow feathers in their wings or tails, not
intermediate between the two. We get a lot of dead flickers at the Slater
Museum, and we've stopped preparing these red-naped red-shafted birds as
anything unusual.

If you have a museum with a large bird collection in your area (at least at
Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle, Tacoma, Pullman, and Corvallis in the
BC-WA-OR axis), you should contact ornithologists there to see if you can
look at their flicker specimens. Bear in mind that the museum specimens
will overrepresent the abundance of intergrades, as curators have
consistently had these more unusual specimens prepared. You can find a lot
of things of interest to birders in these museum trays, for example a
surprising number of "hybrids" between Red-breasted and Red-naped
sapsuckers, now considered two species.

This gives me a chance to add that if there are any birders who are
physicists or ophthalmologists out there, you'll appreciate that the study
of the sex life of this bird has been called "flicker-fusion frequency." I
hope there are no woodpeckers or picophiles out there who consider this
politically incorrect.


Dennis Paulson phone: (206) 756-3798
Slater Museum of Natural History fax: (206) 756-3352
University of Puget Sound email: dpaulson at ups.edu
Tacoma, WA 98416