Admirers flock to Flamingo Hotel in Santa Rosa to see rare bird

The spotting of a white-rumped beauty drew spectators Thursday to the pool patio at Santa Rosa’s Flamingo Hotel.

She’s a Williamson’s sapsucker, a woodpecker that keeps for the most part to the conifer forests of the Sierra Nevada and other mountains of western North America. A visiting wildlife biologist noticed her Thursday in a tall pine alongside the east Santa Rosa resort hotel’s pool.

Emails and social-media dispatches declared that this was only the second known spotting of a Williamson’s sapsucker in Sonoma County. The bird seemed to be looking for food well up the pine.

Members of the species drill tiny holes in bark, then returns to eat the sap that oozes out and also any insects that are stuck in it. Observers noted that, from the presence of a good many holes, it appears she has sojourned in the hotel tree for some time.

Thursday afternoon, Matt Lau, a graduate student in wildlife biology at Humboldt State University, watched the sapsucker through binoculars. “Yes, that’s a gorgeous bird,” he said.

Lau is in Sonoma County for the annual meeting of the Western Section of the Wildlife Society that’s taking place this week at the cross-town Hyatt Vineyard Creek Hotel. He expects that a fair number of participants in the meeting will want to see the bird.

“This is called a lifer,” he added, explaining that it was the first time in his life he’d seen a Williamson’s sapsucker.

Word of the sighting also drew Ruth Rudesill of Kenwood, a member of both the Redwood Regional Ornithological Society and the Madrone Audubon Society.

She shared that a curious thing about this particular bird is that the males and females look so utterly different that it was long believed they were not of the same species.

As she headed to the base of the suddenly popular poolside tree, Rudesill said she’s aware of signs that some mountain birds have for undetermined reasons descended to lowlands.

She couldn’t say why this particular sapsucker is in that Santa Rosa Valley tree, but she certainly was eager to have a look at it.