Black-backed Woodpecker, Forest Hills Cemetery, Boston, MA, January, 2015

A report of a Black-backed Woodpecker at the Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston came across the listserve late one January afternoon.  This species has become exceptionally rare in MA, with just one sighting that I can remember in my 20+ years in New England.  This species was formerly more regular, even having invasion years especially tied to major die-offs in its boreal woodlands (based on information from Viet and Peterson’s Birds of Massachusetts).  So this species was not even on my target list of possible rarities to hope to see in MA.  Another birder tried for it near dusk that day without success.  But given how rare it is, and the relatively short ride from home, I decided to try for it at dawn the next morning.  Denny Abbott needed this species for MA as well (that’s how rare it is!), so we planned to try for this one together.

Denny and I arrived at the cemetery at about 7:30 the next morning and went right to the location where it was spotted the previous day.  We quickly found the conifers it was reported to be feeding in (both pines and hemlocks were in the area).  We mostly searched up on the tree trunks and larger branches, but didn’t find any woodpeckers in the area.  We spent at least an hour and a half at this location with no luck, so decided to search other parts of the cemetery.  We found a few of the regular woodpeckers, but no sign of the Black-backed.  At least 50 other birders there that morning only had negative results as well.  So after 3 hours of searching in some pretty cold temperatures, we called it quits.

Two days later came a post that the Black-backed was refound at the same location.  And this time quite a number of birders got to see it posting several photos of the bird.  They also provided more details of how and where it was feeding - on the trunks of hemlocks, and especially quite low on those trunks.  All the photos showed the bird at eye level or lower, and there were a number of photos that showed that many hemlock trunks were missing patches of bark where the bird had been feeding.  Interestingly, neither Denny nor I noticed any bark missing on the trees – we had been looking too high.  And I spent a lot of time looking in the pine trees in the area which wasn’t even the trees it was feeding in.

So Denny and I were back the next morning, arriving with 8 other car loads of birders just before the gate opened at 7 AM.  Within a couple minutes we were back to the original spot and everyone started to fan out.  Now that I knew where the bird preferred to feed, I headed directly to that grove of hemlocks, and began searching low on the trunks.  Not 30 seconds later I noticed a birder a few feet away point ahead into the grove.  In a couple seconds I was looking in the same direction and there was the Black-backed Woodpecker at eye level no more than 30 feet away! 

Over the next half hour the bird stayed on just one tree and moved no more than 10 feet.  Luckily the bird was on the side of the tree in full view of the birders – otherwise we might not have seen the bird.  And although it was tapping and flaking off little bits of bark almost the whole time, it was tapping so quietly we could not have noticed it if we hadn’t seen it first.  In fact, I wonder if the bird might have been present during our previous trip but we overlooked it, maybe even looking at the right tree but too high off the ground.  Lighting wasn’t the best, but I got these OK phonescoped photos of the bird.

 And here is photo of the bird in action tapping away.

MA was only my 7^th state for this bird of the boreal forest – joining ME, NH, VT, and NY in the northeast, and CA and ID in the west.  And this was #405 for me in MA, and #1,994 in New England.  (closing in on 2,000!)