Oaks & Woodpeckers
Work Zone
I've gotten familiar with the magnificent Valley Oaks and the garrulous Acorn Woodpecker after many days & nights in their habitat.
The woodpeckers stay sqawkingly busy all day, rapping at the dead wood in search of worms, stashing acorns in the holes they have made. They have an interesting society, making communal nests where an entire flock cares for the young, some females refraining from reproducing to concentrate on that task, and contesting for territory with neighbouring flocks.
In the oaks' old age, after providing decades of acorns, they provide shelter and nesting in holes of rotten wood.
The woodpeckers stay sqawkingly busy all day, rapping at the dead wood in search of worms, stashing acorns in the holes they have made. They have an interesting society, making communal nests where an entire flock cares for the young, some females refraining from reproducing to concentrate on that task, and contesting for territory with neighbouring flocks.
In the oaks' old age, after providing decades of acorns, they provide shelter and nesting in holes of rotten wood.
There is more to this landscape. Sandstone strata tilted at steep angles by tectonic forces, after millennia of horizontal deposition being raised to a new fate. Torrential winter rains pound down upon them, sending erosive floods into their rivers. Now their tortured cracks & crevices capture water, delivering delayed runoff and springs to sustain the landscape into the hot summers. They roar and carry logs and boulders, fill valleys with sediment, then a diversity of flowers bloom, frogs croak at night, as they gradually diminish to a trickle.
