Red Cockaded Woodpeckers – A Sticky Business

ambience: call of Red Cockaded Woodpeckers
The Red Cockaded Woodpecker will only excavate a home for itself inside of a living pine tree, never a dead one. The reasons why? Stay tuned. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.

Blanc: They specialize in living trees and in particular living pine tree’s.

Research biologist Lori Blanc.

Blanc: Longleaf pine in particular have a lot of resin, a lot of sap flow. So as a defense mechanism, what they do with these pine trees is they excavate their cavity – where they go and they sleep in every night – but they also will lay their nest in there too. But they also peck little holes around that cavity, called resin Wells. And so when they peck all these little holes around the entire tree around the cavity, it stimulates all of this sap flow.

So you’re looking at the tree and it’s looking like a big candle that’s just dripping and oozing the sap. What that does is it prevents snakes from climbing those trees. So Red Cockaded Woodpeckers are quite vulnerable to snake predation in living pine trees unless they have their defense mechanism, which is to pick the heck out of that tree and just have it seep with sap and sap. And when a snake get set up under one of the scales, it’s a big enough deterrent. It usually falls out of the tree and moves on.

It can take quite a long time for Red Cockaded Woodpeckers to excavate a single cavity in a living tree, but once they’ve excavated that cavity, it’ll last 15 to 20 years. A cavity in a dead tree has a very short life span. It’ll rot, decay. It may last two or three years. They invest a lot of time and energy into creating a cavity, but then that cavity is useful for a long time. It’s valuable real estate. And the family will stick around and tend it, maintain the resin wells, guard that territory.

Pulse of the Planet is made possible in part by Virginia Tech, inventing the future through a hands-on approach to education and research.

Red Cockaded Woodpeckers - A Sticky Business

A woodpecker has devised a clever strategy to protect its nests from snakes.

Air Date:02/26/2015

Scientist:

Transcript:

Red Cockaded Woodpeckers - A Sticky Business

ambience: call of Red Cockaded Woodpeckers
The Red Cockaded Woodpecker will only excavate a home for itself inside of a living pine tree, never a dead one. The reasons why? Stay tuned. I'm Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.

Blanc: They specialize in living trees and in particular living pine tree's.

Research biologist Lori Blanc.

Blanc: Longleaf pine in particular have a lot of resin, a lot of sap flow. So as a defense mechanism, what they do with these pine trees is they excavate their cavity - where they go and they sleep in every night - but they also will lay their nest in there too. But they also peck little holes around that cavity, called resin Wells. And so when they peck all these little holes around the entire tree around the cavity, it stimulates all of this sap flow.

So you're looking at the tree and it's looking like a big candle that's just dripping and oozing the sap. What that does is it prevents snakes from climbing those trees. So Red Cockaded Woodpeckers are quite vulnerable to snake predation in living pine trees unless they have their defense mechanism, which is to pick the heck out of that tree and just have it seep with sap and sap. And when a snake get set up under one of the scales, it's a big enough deterrent. It usually falls out of the tree and moves on.

It can take quite a long time for Red Cockaded Woodpeckers to excavate a single cavity in a living tree, but once they've excavated that cavity, it'll last 15 to 20 years. A cavity in a dead tree has a very short life span. It'll rot, decay. It may last two or three years. They invest a lot of time and energy into creating a cavity, but then that cavity is useful for a long time. It's valuable real estate. And the family will stick around and tend it, maintain the resin wells, guard that territory.

Pulse of the Planet is made possible in part by Virginia Tech, inventing the future through a hands-on approach to education and research.