Living in a house for over 30 years gives perspective to change. We used to have a trio of healthy sugar maples in the front yard and now we have just one showing signs of decay. But unlike the other ones that rotted out at the main trunk, this one is dying from the top.
I noticed this a few years ago as large branches would impale themselves into the soil after a good wind storm. At the same time, I noticed a marked increase in the number of woodpeckers frequenting our feeders and tapping out their morse-code-like signals on my siding.
I thought I had made a deal with them: in return for supplying them with suet throughout the year, they would refrain from pecking at my house.
So far it hasn’t worked.
But what I came to realize in Winter, after all the leaves dropped, is that my sickly maple was a woodpecker hotel of the finest order.
Every morning at first light groups of these birds would swoop down for a first meal. I surmise many are related as two or sometimes three of them would share the feeder. Each day northern flickers as well as downy, hairy, and red-bellied woodpeckers would make their pilgrimage to the feeder just outside our kitchen window. And on rare occasions a pileated woodpecker would also make a visit.
Last year, larger branches started to snap off, many of them former homes of these birds, who carefully dug out a cavity for their eggs and themselves.
Unlike the other sugar maples, we will leave this one standing letting it collapse, one woodpecker home at a time.
