There’s a zoo in Kansas called Tanganyika Wildlife Park, and the fact it doesn’t have zoo in the name makes me wonder if they’re dodging regulation, like how cheese-themed products with no actual cheese in them are named Chezz Product™ or Chedze Matter©.  When my bro lived in KS he took us there.  His daughter was too high speed for our old asses and grabbed a snake by the tail.  Fortunately no harm no foul.  I fed a craisin® to a lemur and a big leaf to a giraffe.  Giraffe heads impressed me with their size the first time I did it, less so the second, altho maybe I was just disoriented by the heat and not really living in the moment.

The first time I went I remember noting there was an absurd variety of US-flavored “blackbirds,” aka icterids.  I saw grackles, boat-tailed grackles, brown-headed cowbirds, red-winged blackbirds, brewer’s blackbirds … unless my memory fails me on any of those particulars.  It’s been a minute.  But one that I can’t forget is from the second (and surely last) time I went:  yellow-headed blackbirds.

Yellow-headed blackbirds are not the most amazing thing going.  Cardinals are probably more fancy looking, with the crest and the sharp designs.  Still, that is some muffuckin’ bright yellow on their heads.  They look like a generic enough american blackbird, like an RWBB maybe, who traded in its red wing flash for a neon yellow football helmet.  The black and yellow is such a powerful and pleasing contrast, like bumblebee fuzz, it’s very appealing.

We saw a small flock in a short sparse tree near an animal enclosure, and my bro rushed to get a blurry pic or two.  Life list for both of us, and I doubt either of us will ever see them again.  Not sure the usual habitat and ways of these beasts, but they liked the sheisty zoo full of oversized ungulates.  I hope they’re still enjoying life in their way, wherever they may roam.

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What does it mean to you, birdies, to run in a mixed flock?  What are you getting out of it?  Who are these other birds, to you?  I’ve seen pics of caracaras that get a black vulture buddy.  Similar sized birds of prey that look extremely different from each other.  Caracaras have a rep for being smarter than the average raptor, and maybe that includes an unusual amount of social flexibility?  Then there’s escaped budgies flying with the starlings…  It’s intriguing.

Less remarkable is when the birds look extremely similar, like when goldfinches fly with pine siskins, or are just a drab pair in general.  The first time I saw ruddy turnstones and surfbirds together, I assumed they were the male and female of the same species.  They were identical, save coloration.  I took some notes the old-fashioned way, may still have been using a flip-phone at the time, and remember one species had yellow-green legs like pencils, and the other had bright carrot orange legs.  Do I remember anything else about their appearances, in shades of brown black and white like 99% of other shorebirds?  Not at all.  I remembered them long enough to make the ID and then lost the memory.

We had gone to Ocean Shores on the Pacific coast of Washington state around the time of my birthday.  I got a fat chocolate cake which felt pretty cool.  That was the occasion when I saw brown pelicans looking like pterosaurs, saw their long skinny wing feathers amid the kelp on the shore.  There was a spit, a kind of rock wall heading out into the water, and on that spit I saw a bunch of shorebirds flying from spot to spot, gleaning food from the rocks.  Shorebirds can be very hard to see in field environments or at distance, because their coloration is effectively cryptic.  Bold black and white head markings break up shape, skinny legs are like blades of grass.  These guys were highly visible on the rocks, some with black and white markings kinda bold under the wings in flight.  So I crawled out there and got a closer look, which was a good time for me.

Sometimes a post will make me think of a song, and I link the yewchoob video for it.  The only ones that jumped out at me were Queen’s “Friends Will Be Friends” and Dionne Warwick’s “That’s What Friends Are For,” and I low-key hate both of those songs (as much as i <3 4eva other things on the Highlander soundtrack).  I often suggest topics of discussion and people seldom bite, but here goes: What unusual animal friendships have you witnessed?

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The pileated woodpecker is the largest woodpecker left in North America, not quite the largest remaining species in the world.  They aren’t especially rare, which is nice.  I’ve only ever seen them from down on the ground, while they were high in a treetop, or on a power line or utility pole.  I’ve heard the call a few times.  It doesn’t sound like Woody Woodpecker at all.  I’ve been lied to!

Woodpeckers are in a freaky offshoot of birdkind called Piciformes, which includes some guys you might not expect, such as toucans.  The tell is in the feet.  They have two front facing and two rear facing toes, allowing them to cling to the verticals of tree trunks more effectively.  OK, they are far from the only birds that do this -see parrots- but they do all have this trait in common.  Parrots are more closely related to falcons and songbirds than to woodpeckers, so this is a case of convergent evolution in funky feet.

It’s pretty cool that tha king of woodpeckin’ is so easy to find.  I’d like a better look at them, but the cost is costly.  My bipolar pater went big into birdfeeding, with specialized lures for the big boys, and was rewarded with some good looks at them, some photographs to commemorate it.  By the time he successfully brought them to the patio, neighbors were getting angry about the bird shit and noise.  It was one of the camelborne straws that caused him to lose that place, always trading down for something worse.

Who’s seen the pileated woodpecker, and did it cause you any trouble?

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There’s this idea some woodpeckers evolve to look similar to larger / more dominant woodpeckers that live in the same area, to take advantage of rep established by a tougher beast, without having to invest in the body size to get tougher themselves.  I proposed in another article that “oregon morph” dark-eyed juncos may be doing the same thing with spotted towhees.  (My idea will be studied by actual scientists when hell freezes over.)  The go-to example in this area is downy woodpeckers trying to look like hairy woodpeckers.

They look similar enough, how can I know which one I’ve seen?  The one I distinctly recall was seen at a very great distance, which is precisely where my sense of scale breaks down.  Can I be sure I could tell the difference between a woodpecker six inches long and one that’s eight inches long, from seventy feet away?  It just seemed like such a small bird, I have to think it was the smaller of the two.  I could very easily be wrong.

Where was this rare beauty?  Near the top of a tall scraggly tree amid concrete on concrete, the Federal Way Transit Center.  There was more appropriate habitat for it in parks and residential area around lakes not far at all, as the bird flies, but that’s not where I saw it.  They could look almost like any old songbird, with more sparrowish proportions than most other woodpeckers, but they’re all black and white, not especially cryptic, and they hang onto trees vertically, without the flattened posture of a creeper or nuthatch.

Not an amazingly exciting bird, but it’s nice to know they’re around.  And that’s not a bad gig, impersonating a more successful person to gain their social cachet.  If I got a toupee and wore foundation, I could kinda look like Matt Damon, hawk crypto on Superb Owl Sunday, make a bank full of funny money.  Watch out!

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