Unique visitor to Lake Carl Blackwell in Stillwater

Friday, February 20, 2015

Taking the classroom to the field, or in this case the lake, gives students hands-on experience with the real world. While teaching his applied ecology and conservation course to Oklahoma State University students, Scott Loss, assistant professor in the department of natural resource ecology and management, spotted an unlikely creature at Lake Carl Blackwell.

A Lewis’s Woodpecker had never been seen in Payne County until Loss and his class made the discovery in November.

“This is the first record for this Rocky Mountain species in Payne County, and one of only a handful for the state east of the panhandle,” Loss said. “All of my students got to see it, many birders from throughout the state, and surrounding states, have come to see it and it has continued to spend the entire winter in and near a gigantic dead cottonwood tree close to the park office.”

Lewis’s Woodpeckers normally inhabit open pine woodlands in mountain foothills, but do wander farther in the wintertime. A fairly nomadic species, its distribution is closely tied to fire as it moves around from one burned forest area to another, tracking the varying abundance of insects.

Sighting this bird is particularly surprising because the Lewis's Woodpecker population is in decline throughout much of its range.

“It’s a relatively poorly studied species even in its home range of the west,” Loss said. “Changing fire management practices could be one driver of the population decline as loss of occasional fire can lead to less favorable closed-forest conditions and reduced food availability.”

The species is the only fly-catching woodpecker in North America. While the typical woodpecker lifestyle involves probing for insects in bark and wood, the Lewis’s Woodpecker takes much of its food by flying out from the perch to grab airborne insects.

“This particular bird has spent much of the winter chasing any and all woodpeckers away from the prized dead cottonwood tree,” said Loss. “The bird also has put up with the presence of a Prairie Falcon spending the winter in the same area and hunting from the same tree.”

There are 10 species of regularly occurring woodpeckers in Oklahoma; seven are widespread across much of the state; two only occur in the far west; and one, the federally endangered Red-cockaded Woodpecker, exclusively inhabits pine-bluestem savannahs in the southeast corner of the state.

“With the Lewis's Woodpecker at Lake Carl Blackwell, particularly lucky birders could see eight woodpecker species in one place,” Loss said.