This posting either has two pictures or nine pictures depending upon your sensitivity.
The survival of a species depends upon two things: food and reproduction. This is about reproduction.
This posting is also about Wild Turkeys, a bird that was unknown in the interior of BC only about 50 years ago. At the urging of hunters south of the border, they were planted in Washington and Oregon 50 to 60 years ago. They soon crept across the border. First here in only small numbers, they are now rather common and are described by eBird as exotic, but naturalized for the Central Kootenay region.
A vast majority of birds form pair bonds, either for a season or for life. Some adopt seasonal or breeding plumage; some do delightful male-female courting behaviours before they mate. However, very few in this region alter their appearance the way Wild Turkeys do. Think of swans. They may have beautiful courtship behaviours, but neither the male nor female bird drastically alters its appearance before they mate.
Birds that do not form a pair bond often have a noticeable courtship display and sometimes it is truly outlandish, and bizarre. It is to this latter group (not forming pair bonds) that the Wild Turkey belongs. Indeed, the sexual display of the male Wild Turkey is perhaps the most striking one in North America.
This is about the mating of the Wild Turkey. You can view the first two pictures and then stop.
This male Wild Turkey is in its full courtship display. It fans its tails, and puffs body feathers. Its featherless head is red, white, and blue with a snood (long red flesh that extends from between the eyes), caruncles (lumpy fleshy folds that wrap around the base of their neck like a white or red scarf weighed down by three bulbous masses), wattles (a thin fold of skin beneath their chins), and a beard (hairs extending from breast). They also strut, gobble, and drum their wings against their bodies.
When they mate, the female lifts its tail and the male lowers its tail until the cloacae come in contact so semen can be exchanged. In this picture most of the feathers belong to the male. Only the female’s head and a few wing feathers are visible. Photo by Cynthia Fraser.
OK, that is end of the first two pictures. What follows are more detailed photos of a separate mating act taken earlier the same morning.
When a female’s pheromones have arisen sufficiently, she will accept the advances of the male and will crouch down in front of him. Some of these shots were taken through tree branches which clutter the pictures. Note, the male’s caruncles are white at this point. They will become red by the end.
He then climbs on top of her.
The male stands atop the female. There then ensues a lifting and lowering of the tails, the object being for the male to bring his cloaca in contact with her cloaca.
Here, the female has lifted her tail and has revealed her cloaca.
Mating: the male lowers his tail and the two cloaca touch. He ejects semen from his cloaca into her cloaca.
The male climbs off, but briefly you can see the semen on her cloaca (along with some running down from it).
They separate and probably have nothing further to do with each other. Notice that the male’s caruncles which were white at the beginning, have now turned red.
The places to look for differences between a Downy and Hairy are marked with four numbers. 
Nesting on wooden pilings
Wooden pilings are used by a few species for breeding. Now that these pilings are on their way out, how will this change? Metal pilings are the new standard.
This is the second of a two part series on wooden pilings. The first was on perchers. This one is on breeders. There are only a few birds that have adopted this fairly recent (and short-lived) innovation for their their breeding, but some have adopted it to the near exclusion of other places. No longer content with trees near the water, they now use wooden pilings that sit in Kootenay Lake. In perhaps a half century, some will need to return to the forest. It is noted that these nesters are also perchers.
The dominant birds using the wooden pilings for breeding are the Osprey, the Northern Flicker, and, to a lesser extent, the Tree Swallow. A few others use them occasionally (e.g., Starling). Of all of these, the Osprey seems most assured of some continuity.
The Northern Flicker is a permanent resident, although their numbers do go up during the migration of other flickers north and south. This flicker is a woodpecker which digs cavities in the wooden pilings in which it, and others, nest. It was noted earlier that nearly all the cavities face the land, presumably as a mechanism to enable it to watch for land predators. This is a tactic that does not seem to have an analogue among flickers that breed on land, so how it was quickly adopted when our flickers chose wooden pilings is unclear. Almost every wooden piling on the lake has at least one flicker cavity.
The Northern Flicker has excavated many nest cavities in the wooden pilings around this lake. Here, a father is seen feeding ant’s eggs to its chick. Although carved by flickers, the cavities are extensively used by other birds such as the Tree Swallow.
While a few other birds use flicker cavities, the dominant one seems to be the Tree Swallow. Here a father is bringing food to his chicks, each of which has its mouth open to accept it. However, since the Tree Swallow also regularly breeds elsewhere, a loss of wooden pilings is not expected to bother it significantly.
Ospreys are now the dominant breeder on wooden pilings. At earlier times, they chose trees beside the lake, although ones that usually were not quite so precarious as the one shown in this 1887 illustration. In modern times I have only seen a few couples nest in a tree, but now they almost exclusively nest on wooden pilings, dolphins, or special lake-side poles erected for them.
My earliest knowledge of ospreys nesting on wooden pilings comes from Troup. I don’t know when these had been put in, but pictures reveal that they were not there in the mid-1890s and were in place in 1929. In the mid-1940s, I summered right across the lake from Troup and I recall my uncle talking (in dismay) about someone setting the pilings on fire so as to kill the birds nesting on them. Apparently the arsonist’s logic was that the ospreys caught and ate fish, and, not liking the competition, he wanted to catch those fish for himself. Apart from the cruelty involved, his logic was flawed in that ospreys do not generally catch the same fish as those preferred by people. These pilings still show the signs of having been burnt (photo from 2005). However, it is clear that, by the 1940s, ospreys were building nests on the fairly newly established pilings.
I don’t know when Ospreys began to build nests on dolphins (as distinct fr0m on isolated pilings), but it was probably in the 1960s. In the early 1970s, the number of Ospreys around Kootenay Lake began to increase, and many of these magnificent birds chose the dolphins as a nesting site. Now, an Osprey nest is a rather substantial structure, and when built at the top of a dolphin, it engulfed the light rendering it useless. Although at first the government would remove the nest to reveal the light, they soon changed tactics. They accepted a suggestion by Bob Denison that platforms be added above the light. Since his summer cottage was at Atbara (at the Nine-mile narrows), the dolphin there was the first to have this addition (which he put up himself). These platforms now characterize all dolphins and most play host to Osprey nests and Ospreys. This is the platform on the top of the Nine-mile dolphin at Atbara. Indeed, this practice of building a nesting place for the osprey has gone further than dolphins now. The power company and also private individuals have erected nesting platforms on poles placed near the lake which the ospreys have used.
While I found I do not have a satisfactory shot of a constructed nest platform installed solely for the osprey, I do have a shot of two (full sized) chicks that had just flown from one while their parent watched from above. We can tell these are chicks because of their orangish eyes and their white-flecked wings.
The osprey’s preference for nests on or beside the lake is driven by its food: it catches fish.
This view of a nest on a wooden piling is of the father osprey bringing a fish to his family. There are three chicks (white spotted wings) and his partner (plain brown wings). When the wooden pilings vanish, the osprey will be likely be fine; it will still have trees and erected platforms on pilings and the dolphins, all in or close to the water.
An advantage of the wooden pilings is that they are out in the water and so free from land predators. This, of course, changes when Kootenay Lake water levels are low during the spring, but then that is not the nesting period. I have assumed that the main land predators of concern would be raccoons. But the squirrel is the only land predator I have thus far seen attacking a nest cavity. In fact, wooden pilings have been a particularly safe place for a nest cavity. Metal pilings will certainly bring advantages to people, but the safe perch and nest will be lost.
As a digression, I note that I have not covered all of the nesters to be found on a wooden piling. There are others. Consider this deer fly laying eggs on a piling. Deer flies were seen laying near the same spot on two separate years.
The eventual loss of the wooden pilings will be a disappointment for the ardent nature observer, but the animals will adjust. Probably the greatest loser will be the Northern Flicker who found a largely predator-free place to nest. So here is another shot, this one of the mother feeding its two chicks.
