Up until recently I'd never heard of a Williamson's sapsucker. My son Sam, who is into woodpeckers, showed me a photo of one he'd taken on Mount Waterman in the San Gabriel Mountains, not far from the Buckhorn Campground. It is a beautiful bird, sleek black with yellow on its breast and a red patch on its throat and it cultivates pine trees to produce sap. It apparently makes the rounds each day to its cultivated trees, which consist of holes that it has engineered with its beak which produce a nice flow of sap. Once I learned where the grouping of trees was I have been to it several times, sitting in my car, with the driver's side window down, watching for it to appear. I've seen it twice now, the second time it was there when I arrived and I watched it long enough to snap 179 photos before I got tired of it and quit. It had hardly moved the entire time.
The first time I parked and waited for several hours for it to arrive, which it eventually did. It landed in full sight, then apparently noticed me there and played shy, hiding in a crook of a tree just giving me partial glimpses - enough to see the yellow and the red on it. Ultimately if flew to another tree with a prominent set of holes and went to work tapping into its life-giving sap. I have become quite a fan of this beautiful bird.
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| Huge holes, apparently deep and wide, perhaps with wells of sap inside. |
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| Lots of small holes and sap running down the side of the tree. |
Most woodpeckers, male and female, look alike. In this case the male and female look completely different. See the illustrations from Birds of the World below. Because of this, the male and female were considered two different species until an ornithologist discovered a nest in Colorado in 1873 and found both of these apparent two species raising a brood of youngsters.
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| Female |
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| Male |
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| Range map from Birds of the World. Orange is breeding, light blue wintering and purple is year-round. |
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