This is bird note.

Two robin-sized woodpeckers ascend the same massive pine trunk.

The first woodpecker is tawny brown and cryptically patterned.

The second is glistening black, boldly accented with white, yellow, and red.

The two couldn't look more mismatched. But this is a

mated pair of Williamson's sap-suckers, a migratory species that nests in the mountain forests

throughout much of the west. Their radically different plumages so confounded 19th-century naturalists, that for nearly a decade, the birds were put down in the books as different species.

Williamson's sap suckers share western forests with a dozen species of woodpeckers.

Yet sap suckers are unique among woodpeckers in drilling neat rows of tiny holes in the trunks of trees.

Sap oozes very slowly from the holes, a food for the sap suckers. The sap also acts like flypaper,

snagging small insects collected by foraging hummingbirds and warblers.

The conservation success of Williamson's sap sucker requires well-informed forest management.

By allowing low-intensity fires to create open stands of large conifers,

and by preserving clusters of old Aspen snags, land managers can help

create ideal nest trees for Williamson's sap-suckers. The West wouldn't be the same without them.

For Bird Note, I'm Michael Stein.