Oaks & Woodpeckers
Work Zone
I've gotten familiar with the magnificent Valley Oaks and the garrulous Acorn Woodpeckers 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, after millennia of horizontal deposition, are tilted at steep angles by tectonic forces. Torrential winter rains pound down upon their slopes, sending erosive floods into streams & rivers. Now the tortured cracks & crevices in the sandstone capture water, delivering delayed runoff and springs to sustain the landscape into the hot summers. Rivers roar and carry logs and boulders, fill valleys with sediment, then a diversity of flowers bloom, frogs croak at night, as the streams gradually diminish to a trickle.
