UNLESS YOU’RE FROM OKLAHOMA
This stunning flicker has been visiting Jeanne Kosciw’s feeders in Tolland. Tom Sayers took the photo, which to my knowledge is first one documenting an intergrade flicker in Connecticut. What is an intergrade flicker? Sorry, time for a little taxonomy. At one time two species of flickers divvied up most of the continent, Yellow-shafted Flickers in the East and Red-shafted Flickers in the West. (For the sake of simplicity we’ll leave a third form, the Gilded Flicker of the Southwest, out of the discussion.) Eventually the biological thinking changed. Yellow-shafted and Red-shafted Flickers interbreed over a wide area in the center of continent, a fact that contributed to their being lumped into a single species, known as the Northern Flicker. The yellow-shafted and red-shafted forms now became subspecies or races. The products of their interbreeding are known as intergrades, as opposed to hybrids. Hybrids result from interbreeding between full species. Occasionally flickers showing varying amounts of red-shafted traits appear in the East. Glenn Williams wrote in The Connecticut Warbler (Vol. 30 No. 1) about an intergrade seen at Bluff Point in Groton on Sept. 20, 2009. In his research for the article Glenn found no instances of pure red-shafted birds from the Northeast. Banding studies of birds showing red-shafted traits have concluded the birds were intergrades.
Tom’s photo shows a bird with a yellow-shafted head pattern (gray cap over tan face with red nape crescent, as opposed to the tan cap, gray face and lack of red crescent in red-shafted) but with strongly red undersides to the tail feathers. The bird is a female because it lacks a “whisker” or malar mark (black in yellow-shafted, red in red-shafted). I’m certain this is the first time this form has been photographed in Connecticut.
Beautiful bird.
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