Subject: flicker mystery
Date: Jan 27 16:23:40 2002
From: Netta Smith - nettasmith at attbi.com


I wrote about the social flickers in our yard the other day, and now I'm
writing about the antisocial ones. Any day I'm home and looking out the
back windows, I'm likely to see flickers in the yard quite a few times,
actually surprisingly frequently at the two suet feeders. Very often, as I
wrote, there are 2-3 birds. Often I look out and see several perched in one
of the leafless trees in the ravine behind us. Today, with about an inch of
snow on the ground and snowing on and off, NO FLICKERS visited the yard.
This was really surprising. I saw one perched for over an hour on top of a
tree behind us, and another flew over the yard at another time but no other
sightings. I know they weren't here, even when I wasn't watching, because
there are no flicker tracks streaking the snow below the feeders; they just
about always drop to the ground and pick up suet they've dislodged. I would
have predicted that the snow on the ground would have made them even more
eager to chow down on nice, energy-rich fat, but that wasn't the case at
all. Very strange....

Dennis Paulson
--
Netta Smith and Dennis Paulson
1724 NE 98 St.
Seattle, WA 98115