Ants - Great for Breakfast, & So Much More

Ants for Breakfast?

I caught the flicker “red-anted” No, that’s not a typo. Last fall I watched a flicker forage for ants—first hammering the ground, then dipping his head deep in the hole and emerging successful, time after time, with his breakfast of ants (see the picture I took below, and note the ant leg sticking out of his bill).

Flickers are one of the few woodpeckers that regularly forage on the ground for one of their favorite foods. In the book Birds of Oregon (David Marshall et al.) researchers evaluating the diet of flickers found 40 percent of stomach contents to be ants—with a few stomachs containing over 2000 each! My stomach churns just thinking about it!

In winter, however, with insects in short supply, flickers regularly dine at my feeders—enjoying suet, seeds, and shelled nuts. Turns out their long, barbed tongues, covered with sticky saliva efficient for extracting ants from their nests, are also quite effective at snaring a sunflower chip or two from my caged feeder while the ants are on hiatus.

But apparently flickers don’t just eat ants--they may also use ants in grooming.

This interesting behavior, called “anting” was said to be first noted by the infamous John James Audubon in reference to wild turkeys. Birds rub the ants on their feathers and skin, a process believed to release formic acid which may act to control problem parasites such as mites.

While the exact function of anting has been hotly debated among scientists, I will keep a watch for this behavior in my backyard—and please keep me posted on what you are seeing in yours!

Have a Bluebird Day!

Carol