![]() ![]() There are crevices for insects hiding from winter where pane meets wall and trim meets roof. ![]() My house is stucco and siding, no wood, but flickers knock it anyway. They’re probing for edible bugs in the bark. They also have stiff tail feathers propping them up as they poke around, climb and knock. They have long, strong toes with curved nails that grab bark so their stance looks like they’re defying gravity. I’ve seen flickers perched sideways on the trunk of the large, commanding willow tree in my backyard. They knock, or drum, with their beaks for two reasons. Around my Idaho home, I often see brilliant red-orange shafts, but never yellow. The origin of the ‘shafted’ identification is inspired by flashy bars of color under brown speckled wings that reveal when the bird with the black-barred back and dotted belly flies. They used to be classified as red-shafted flickers in the West and yellow-shafted flickers in the East, but the ranges of the two overlap and they cross breed so now they’re all classified as northern flickers. Northern flickers, also known as harry-wickets, are the most widespread woodpecker in North America. © Felip1 / Flickr Why Flickers Knock on Your House ![]() “Sometimes they try to excavate and go after insects, but they also use structures because they make them louder in urban environments that don’t have a lot of dead trees.” A flicker foraging in a household gutter. “If I were a flicker, I would look at houses as big trees,” says Chris Anderson, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist. The bird does its funny bounce-float fly in retreat but doesn’t go far, moving only from my son’s bedroom wall above my office to my neighbor’s leafless tree across the street. It’s a flicker, the source of the knock, and now it’s fleeing like one of the neighbor kids pranking a doorbell ditch. That’s when movement to my right catches my eye. I yank open the front door, look out then step out turning back toward my own house. But I’m not expecting anything, there’s no brown truck at my curb and there’s no one on my porch. Comes in handy when the guy in brown driving the brown truck delivers packages. There are windows on most of the walls so I can easily see when anyone approaches my porch. My workspace is situated at the front of my house near the entry door. I push my chair away from my desk, stand up and leave my office. Knock, knock, knock, knock, knock. “Well that’s strange,” I say to myself looking out the window. I stop editing video and take off my headphones. ![]()
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