This is bird note.

Listen to one of nature's most skilled carpenters at work.

A woodpecker, a northern flicker, is carving out a nest cavity, clinging halfway up an old dead tree.

The bird uses its chisel-like bill to chip out a round entrance hole, three inches across.

The flicker then excavates a cavity a foot or more deep inside the trunk,

a safe haven for raising its young.

Chances are the flickers will use this cavity for just one nesting season.

But that cavity may have a prolonged career as a home for small owls, bluebirds, swallows, and other birds, including one very special duck.

In the boreal forest of northern North America, the small black and white duck named the

buffalhead nests almost exclusively in old flicker cavities. A number of other ducks also incubate their eggs in tree cavities, but buffal heads are the only

ones small enough to use the cavities of flickers. Yet clear cutting in some northern forests has reduced nesting habitat for flickers and

buffal heads alike.

Both benefit when consumers choose for Flickers and Buffalo Heads alike.

Both benefit when consumers choose paper products

made from recycled paper.

For Bird Note, I'm Michael Stein.

Support for Bird Note is provided by Jerry Tone and Martha Wykov from Seattle, Washington,

and generous listeners around the world.