As I was making my way around edge-of-the-marsh trail, at the spot where I often flush up a Flicker, a female-plumaged Downy Woodpecker came popping up instead. Either the bird was not very familiar with the shrub-and-bush terrain or it was a young bird and not yet much of a flyer. In any case, it had a lot of trouble taking off, banging into the reeds and bushes before it could get clear of the shrubbery and head back into the woodland edge. Eventually, I realized that there were two birds -- probably an adult and a fledgling. Usually the Downy Woodpecker nest is easy to find (the nestlings make a lot of noise inside the brood hole before they fledge) but I didn't find it this year; nevertheless, they are certainly still nesting someplace around here.
On the other side of the property, from a neighbor's dock jutting out just past the outflow from the pond and marsh, I noticed several large birds perched on trees by the pond edge: a Snowy and a Great Egret and, on the bare limbs of a dead pine, an Osprey attending to its toilette. Since Ospreys get wet and have to manage some fair-size fish, their attention to feather maintenance is probably an important part of their daily ritual. My usual path from the dock is along the side of the pond but, after watching the Osprey taking care of its grooming with such meticulous care, I was unwilling to flush him (or her) and decided to take an alternate route back, cutting through the woods. In the process, I came upon a veritable thicket of Indian Pipe that had sprouted from the leaf litter on the forest floor (Indian Pipe is, of course, the ghostly, mushroom-like flowering plant without chlorophyll that gets its nutrients from buried wood). Except it wasn't Indian Pipe but a similar plant with many flower heads to a stem (Indian Pipe was one per stem) and a cream- or even tan-colored coloration (Indian Pipe is dead white). This was the equally strange and wonderful Pinesap, a related chlorphyll-less saprophyte! I have never seen it here before (see photo below).
Eric Salzman
Eric Salzman
P.O. Box 775 (14 Randall Lane)
East Quogue NY 11942
631 653-5236
es@ericsalzman.com
www.ericsalzman.com
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