Hi Tweets,

Kerri W. Scarbrough, O.D. writes:

> Off and on all winter we've had a female yellow-shafted flicker eating at
our suet. (She is missing the red crescent so must be a little bit of a
cross). She is undaunted by the starlings and in fact has even chased them
away.
> My question is: When she breeds with the red-shafted male that is hanging
around, what will the babies look like? Is the inheritance pattern dominant
for one or the other or will the babies turn out a mixture? Either way I
hope they get her feistiness!

It's quite possible that the yellow-shafted will head back north to wherever
she comes from, a good chance it's somewhere in northeastern BC; maybe the
male will also leave, quite probably to another area more to the west. Where
the two forms meet they produce hybrids with all kinds of intermediate
characteristics. You'll see definite influxes of flickers, both classic and
intergrade, in September and October.

As far as 'feistiness' goes, flickers are definitely some of your crankier
customers at a feeder. They seem to be able to tolerate each other in a wide
open space like a park field, and migrant (and arrival?) flocks will feed
close together in such an area relatively peacefully, but being close
together in a small space seems to evoke ill-temper between them.

Michael Price
Vancouver BC Canada
mprice at mindlink.net