September 13, 2009 - Flicker Flight

Welcome to the Nature Notebook.

One of North American’s most abundant woodpeckers, the northern flicker is quietly slipping through our state. Unless you watch for their fall migration you might not realize that these birds with golden wing linings are gone. More flickers are moving now than during the more intermittent spring migration. Instead of raucous woodpeckers bobbing through the trees calling loudly, migrating flickers are flowing in a stately high flight over the forest canopy, silent as monarch butterflies that share their southward movement. Because flickers spend most of their foraging time on the ground searching for ants, they spend the winter months in the southern United States where warmer conditions are more conducive to finding food. If you are observant you just might see a flicker or two searching for food in your lawn on a brief stopover before continuing its southward flight.
 
This is PPL's naturalist, Jon Beam, with the Nature Notebook for WVIA.