The other day, I saw a Williamson’s Sapsucker on the trunk of a pine and tried to get a picture, but the bird kept scuttling around to the other side of the tree, obviously avoiding me. I would move, he would move, I would move, he would move, etc. Sometimes I could just see his head peeking out from behind the trunk, apparently waiting to see what I’d do next. I never did get a clear shot of him and had to settle for this photo of sapsucker “wells” in the tree.
Sapsucker wells without the sapsucker
The scuttling sapsucker reminded me of other woodpeckers I’ve seen doing exactly the same thing, but also of a beetle (Saxinis sp.) I found on a hike last year in the Carson Range, just outside of Reno. This beetle was clinging to a flower stalk of a buckwheat, and, like the sapsucker, it scuttled to the back side, which seemed kind of silly because the beetle was wider than the stalk. It was like the kid playing hide-and-seek who crouches behind a rock too small to conceal him. And the beetle reminded me of anole lizards on tall rainforest trees on islands in the Panama Canal, and also of mantis insects in some woods I can no longer place (Louisiana?)—the anoles and mantises were back-side scuttlers too.
Saxinis beetle on buckwheat (Eriogonum)
Which makes me wonder—how many other species do this? I would guess that, if you’re a highly visual creature and you spend a lot of time moving around on natural cylinders you can easily hide behind (trunks or branches or stalks, depending on your size), then scuttling to the back side is probably a standard part of your repertoire. If that’s true, there must be thousands of different kinds of back-side scuttlers out there. And, now that I’m thinking about this, and have written it down (there’s a lot to be said for the act of writing it down), I’ll be on the lookout for the next one.
After a while, I circled the pine more quickly, trying to catch up with the sapsucker. But he was gone, having scuttled and then, while out of my view, taken flight. Beetles and mantises can pull that move too. Anoles can’t fly but they still have an out—they just go scurrying up the tree.
Savannah Anole (Anolis roquet)—not the species I saw in Panama, but probably also a backside scuttler. By 0x0x10C (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0), via Wikimedia Commons
The Monkey's Voyage 