Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
The i rst hole on Balmoral Golf Course in Battle Lake, Minnesota, is a
straightaway, four-hundred-yard-long par four. I waited for the twosome on
the tee to hit their drives so I could lag behind and bird without disrupting
their play. I stuck to the rough, which included patches of oak and aspen sa-
vannah, marshes, and pinewoods. I got the birdie I sought just short of the
green on my i rst hole. The mul ed
waamp, waaaaamp, waahhhmp
led me to
a thirty-foot-tall, broken-top, scraggly aspen. On the tree's northeast side I
could see an anxious velvet head poking out of a small hole. A female red-
headed woodpecker, her headdress glowing in an early ray of sun, cried out in
hunger. Her mate soon arrived and fed her. I watched him hawk insects in the
rough and ferry his catch back to his incubating partner as she sat tightly in
the dark nest cavity they drilled deep into the soft heart of the old aspen tree.
His uniform was British—deep red, black, and white. But this bird is uniquely
American, one of our more sensitive species that has declined substantially
throughout its midwestern range.
Red-headed woodpeckers are often found on golf courses because these
settings imitate the oak savannahs that the species naturally lived in. Open,
moderately disturbed habitats have declined as oak, hickory, and beech for-
ests matured without the diversifying ef ects of natural i re. Other places this
species used were lost as borders with trees around row crops were plowed
and orchards were cut. Golf courses have taken up some of the slack. Where
some dead trees and limbs remain, woodpeckers nest as successfully on
courses as of of them. In Ohio, three of four woodpecker pairs l edged at least
one young, regardless of being in the company of golfers. The pair I found in
Minnesota was well along the same path.
The red-headed woodpecker was only the start of a great round of birding
at Balmoral. In the nearby conifers bordering the sixth fairway I got an eagle. A
bald eagle, no less! From only a few feet above me a majestic adult, its white
head and tail stunning against the green landscape, l ew down the adjacent
