When sailing south from Charleston down the Atlantic coast in mid-November of 1831, moorings to collect fresh water and hunt for game gave John James Audubon ample opportunity to explore the savannah woodlands that seemed to stretch as far to the west as the sea and the waves of the Atlantic did to the east.
The most common tree that grew in the savannah woodlands was the Longleaf pine (Pinus palustris). The savannah woodlands once covered virtually everything between the beaches, saltmarshes and maritime forests of the Atlantic seaboard and the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains from Virginia all the way across the southeastern United States to Texas. And where there were Longleaf pines, there had to be fire. Without fire, there is too little bare soil for the seeds of the Longleaf pine to germinate and receive full sunlight in order to reach maturity. When and where fires failed to ignite naturally, indigenous people worked to set them intentionally.
Indigenous people gained multiple benefits from planned burning. The ground was kept clear of impenetrable stands of sharp pointed hollies, prickly smilax, and saw-toothed palmettos. Grasses grew that attracted deer and buffalo for hunting. Plants that beared edible berries and fruits had a chance to grow and proliferate. And where there was fire and smoke, there were far fewer mosquitoes, ticks, flies, spiders, and any number of other bothersome insects. Indigenous people managed burns not just in the southeastern United States but far into the western frontier of North America. It is arguable that the greatest impact that Anglo-European settlement has had on the North American landscape is fire suppression.
In the places where John James Audubon noted forest burning had recently occurred, the birds were almost unrecognizable from being stained with soot. One of which was the Downy woodpecker. The breasts and bellies of the bird were “so soiled by the carbonaceous matter adhering to the trees, in consequence of the burning of the grass at that season, that one might be apt to take a specimen in that state, as belonging to a different species.” Audubon used the soot on the breast of the Downy Woodpecker (no. 1) for his drawing in Birds of America.
The more derogatory name that was used for the Downy woodpecker was “Sapsucker.” Growers, harvesters, and owners of trees blamed the Downy woodpecker for converting tree trunks into pin cushions to get to the sap of the trees. Alexander Wilson (1766-1813) and John James Audubon defended the Downy woodpecker by arguing that the bird was performing a service to the tree by hammering into the tree and ridding the tree of harmful insects and pests. Scientists today refer to one species helping another species to survive as mutualism. Whether or not participating in mutualism, scientists, including Audubon, started to suspect that the Downy woodpecker was not involved.
Alexander Wilson regarded the Yellow-bellied woodpecker as a “resident” bird. Whereas Audubon observed that the Yellow-bellied woodpecker was anything but resident. “This beautiful species returns to Louisiana and the other Southern States about the beginning of October. It remains there during the winter, and takes its departure before the beginning of April, after which period I have never observed it in these districts. It is seen in Kentucky, and a few breed there; but the greater number return to the middle and especially the northern parts of the Union.”
Since woodpeckers are typically resident, the Yellow-bellied woodpecker migrating kept raising questions as to whether it was really a woodpecker. Then it was discovered that it was not the Downy woodpecker but the Yellow-bellied woodpecker that was the culprit in sapsucking. Although, instead of sucking sap, what the sapsucker was really looking for was insects attracted by sap. Once a tree was discovered producing sap, the Yellow-bellied woodpecker continued drilling more holes in the tree with the expectation that the sap would attract more insects for the taking. In 1858, Spencer Fullerton Baird (1823-1887) concluded that the title of Sapsucker belonged to the Yellow-bellied woodpecker rather than the Downy woodpecker.