In Defense of "Burger King trees"

As a naturalist who lives to take students for nature hikes in the woods, I have a few catch phrases I always seem to use. One is “Burger King trees” to mean any old snag that is riddled with holes, either by insects or woodpeckers.  The implication is that a dead tree is “fast food” to these animals, a quick place to pick up a lunch of carpenter ants, termites, bark beetles etc.  Trying to let people know how important these old lifeless trees are to wildlife is probably a fact all you wise readers already know.

 In this blog though I would like to talk about what you can glean from the different kind of holes you see, who hammered what and why.  The reason this topic came to mind is when I was in ME with my grandchildren I would walk the dog in the woods across the way each morning before anyone was up.  There were so many wonderful examples of “BK” trees that I took these pictures with the intent to share the knowledge with all of you, so lets look at them now.

A dead tree may still have some bark on or it may be stripped away.  If you see perfectly circular holes in either bark or the deadwood underneath you are looking at the work of an insect; possibly, a beetle or some ants.  Carpenter ants leave a lot of sawdust behind but smaller ants, not so much.  Their jaws have strong mandibles for chewing through the wood but I couldn’t find any explanation anywhere of why the holes are soooo perfect.  

Bark beetles, who lay their eggs under the bark of trees, leave a circle in the bark, but, if the bark is peeled away, what you will see are a series of carved tracks.  They always remind me of Indian carvings, where the separate larvae went their separate ways eating the wood as they went.  Those tracks dead end into a more circular spot where the now-fattened grub went into a pupa and then ,after weeks, wham, flew out through another hole in the bark as an adult beetle.  Different species of different bark beetles leave different tracks, some very wide from larger grubs, some almost spidery from minute ones.  Either way they are very cool to see.

If you come upon a more hammered hole, than I bet you can guess, THAT is the work of a woodpecker.  The spectacular, practically prehistoric,

 Pileated Woodpecker lives in Maine and leaves huge rectangular shapes where he has been dining on carpenter ants.  It is THE largest forest bird on our continent with an impressive bill for hammering away, a neck long enough to let him get a distance from the tree before he whams it and  a tail and feet that anchor him in place while he is doing the whamming. 

  And why he doesn’t suffer the same fate as football players do from “one to many hits to the head “is because he is adapted for this sort of abuse.  The skull bone at his front and at his nape is riddled with air pockets that help absorb the shock.  Someone calculated that the Pileated woodpecker hits the tree at about 15mph and does so up to 12,000X a day! 

His beak has a longer top than bottom but the bottom is very strong and they say it takes the blow and redirects that energy towards its lower jaw and not the brain.  Amazing.  Smaller woodpeckers make smaller holes but in general their hammering produces a jagged hole than the perfect circle left by an insect. 

So get out there and check out your dead trees.  Of course they could also be the equivalent of Air B&B’s for the likes of raccoon and opossum, owls and wood ducks and even flying squirrels. Flying squirrels often chew around their opening where the other animals do not. If you really want to know if you have a flying squirrel, and how exciting would that be! then look around the ground for nuts that have been chewed on opposite sides, also in a perfect circle.

Have we ever talked about “nuts and chews” and who eats which nut which way?  Not sure, but many other topics to cover first. I have been traveling and time to write has been hard to come by but topics are surely backing up in my mind.  I think the next one will have to be about the morning commute, bird commute that is, that I witnessed each sunrise at my friends house in Rhode Island.  Till then, if the tree isn’t threatening your house, please let a dead tree lie!