I heard one today near Foster; the "wik-wik-wik" is pretty unmistakeable. The flicker is by far my favorite bird. Though wikipedia claims that the flicker likes to nest in forests, they're all over my neighborhood. Fun things I learned today about the flicker:
They mate for life.
They use the acids in the ants they eat to preen.
The males and females share egg-sitting duty.
Their flight pattern is also pretty fascinating. They pump their wings like mad for a moment, then still their wings, careening like a bullet and dropping a few feet before they flap and rise again. There are many on campus. This is the bird that got me into birding when I spied one hammering away at our telephone pole from the bedroom window--I didn't know that woodpeckers dug urban living. Hooray!
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Thanks so much for ginning up this blog! As for the flicker, there's a rhyme and reason to that flight pattern: that pump-glide pattern makes the flight path of the flicker into a sine wave. I don't remember why that is favorable for the physics of flight (maybe one of Clark's real scientists could weigh in on this), but my understanding is that it's the only way to fly.
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