Woodpeckers of Bay & River Country

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Pileated woodpeckers are the elusive royalty of the woodpecker family. Although their range is broad, they are seldom seen. As their native deciduous forests disappear by rampant development, their numbers are threatened. One day soon they may become extinct, and the world will be a sorrier place without them.

Each evening, a solitary pileated male returns to his tree hollow high up in a beech tree on my pond bank. His cackling calls announce his return home as the sun sinks behind the trees. He is a large bird, red head ablaze against a field of black and white feathers. He clutches his entranceway for a brief moment and surveys the tree canopy for predators before popping inside. Tree cavities offer two significant advantages over roosting in the open: security and comfort.

With the demise of the ivory-billed woodpecker, the pileated woodpecker has gained the distinction of being the largest living member of the Picidae family in North America and plays a vital role in the forests where it lives. The large excavations they create provide nesting, roosting and denning quarters for a host of other cavity dwellers, including other woodpeckers, bats, squirrels, raccoons, song birds, raptors and snakes. The pileated woodpecker’s enormous cavities are often the only sign of its presence in the area. If you listen, the sound of distance chopping and distinctive call helps signify its presence.  

Pileated means crested, and its head’s red crest is quite distinctive. One may find its outline familiar, as cartoonist Walter Lantz used the pileated woodpecker’s jaunty crest and maniacal call as models for his most famous creation, Woody Woodpecker. Woody’s antics were no exaggeration. The pileated woodpecker’s forceful drumming is loud and resonant, echoing through the forest in a series of forceful taps. They are foraging for their favorite food, carpenter ants. Additional foods include other insects, seasonal fruits and berries. One summer I watched one make short work of a rotten beech stump loaded with ants and grubs.

There are several species of woodpeckers in our region, each with its own niche in the environment. In addition to the pileated, there is the red-bellied, downy, hairy, red-headed, northern flicker and yellow-bellied sapsucker. Woodpeckers are among the most ancient of birds. A 25-million-year old fossil leg bone found in Germany, a feather trapped within a piece of 24-million-year old Caribbean amber, and cavities in 50-million-year-old petrified trees in our desert southwest offer proof of their presence on the planet long before man.

All true woodpeckers have the ability to excavate their own homes, generally in tall mature trees. If trees are not readily available, substitutes will do: cacti, fence posts or utility posts. In the past, wanton killing of all types of woodpeckers and sapsuckers was carried out by farmers protecting their crops and homeowners defending their homes. Structural damage to wooden utility poles continue to plague power companies today. Lumber companies have learned to coexist with these birds, but yearly losses to timber and fruit trees amount to more than 1.25 million dollars annually. As woodpeckers’ natural habitats continue to disappear, they quickly adapt. Now protected by law, it is illegal to kill woodpeckers except with a permit issued by the appropriate government authorities, who must first be convinced that all nonlethal options have been exhausted. Homeowners might consider the woodpecker as doing a good service by alerting them to possible bug infestations in or near their homes.

The daily chuk-chuk of a red-bellied woodpecker announces his presence at the bird feeder. As its toes cling to the seed tray, its beak sends black oiled sunflower seeds flying as it searches for those morsels already shelled. Soon, a pile of unopened seeds litters the ground. A bag of woodpecker mix at a local feed and seed store solved that problem.

The name red-bellied is a bit of a misnomer, since its belly feathers range in color from blush to pink to pale red. The males sport bright red heads, while the females have red only on their nape, with occasional red feathers in the center of their crowns. Its range covers much of the eastern half of the US, but with a warming climate, there have been sporadic sightings further west and north into Canada.

Red-bellied woodpeckers tap rather than drum, and males use tapping as a means to feed and to attract a mate. If the female accepts his advances, she taps back with synchronized tapping. Together they excavate a nest in snags or dead portions of live trees. Pairs separate after their young fledge, often coming back together to produce the next clutch. Their diet is highly diverse, more so than other woodpeckers. In addition to insects, they consume a variety of nuts, fruit, seeds, bird eggs, sap, flower nectar and small vertebrates. In autumn, they have been known to cache food for the pending winter.

Many novice birders have trouble telling the downy and hairy woodpeckers apart. Despite the fact the downy is the smallest woodpecker living in North America, the two share colorations making them almost impossible to tell apart when seen from a distance. They both sport distinctive white stripes down the center of the back in a field of black feathers, and their heads are marked with contrasting areas of black and white. It is their bills that separate the two. The downy’s bill is blunt and shorter than the length of its head from front to back, while the hairy’s pointed bill is as long or longer than its head.

Both are lively little woodpeckers that have adapted well to suburban backyards and are familiar visitors to backyard feeders. They are active foragers, moving incessantly up and down the trunks of trees, probing for insect eggs among the leaves and bark. In late winter and early spring, you may see them licking sap from tree wounds or sapsucker wells. Give up trying to tell the difference? Just enjoy their presence!

One of our most colorful woodpeckers, the red-headed is widely distributed in the eastern US but uncommon as well. Unlike other species who prefer abundant stands of timber, the red-belly prefers open fields with scattered trees or even urban parks. They were once familiar sights when early settlers cleared large patchworks of fields for growing crops. Their numbers declined rapidly in the early 1900s, and in the southeast they are the fastest declining woodpecker.

Red-bellied woodpeckers are the most omnivorous of North American woodpeckers. Almost half of its forage comes from airborne insects. They frequently drop down from their perches to capture grasshoppers, worms, lizards and mice as well. Bird eggs and nestlings are also taken. Their summer diets consist of nuts, corn, and wild and cultivated fruit. In fall you may spot them caching nuts, seeds and insects in holes and cracks in tree bark and even under roof shingles.

The northern flicker earned its name from the white patch and bright color of its wing and tail linings. It is our least arboreal woodpecker and spends time feeding on the ground in pastures, hedgerows and logged or burned forests. Of the four species subsets, two are common in North America. The red-shafted and yellow-shafted, descended from a common ancestor, were divided into separate, isolated populations during the last ice age. By the time the glaciers retreated and the two groups reunited, each had evolved distinct plumage differences.

Although free to co-mingle, a diagonal line from the northwestern corner of North America down towards the Gulf of Mexico continues to divide the two. The yellow-shafted flicker inhabits our region. The name, northern flicker, refers to both species and is the second largest surviving woodpecker in North America. Flickers often migrate with the seasons and available food supply. In a region such as ours, where insects, berries and seeds are abundant, they often remain year round.

The yellow-bellied sap sucker is poorly named, since all sapsuckers have some coloration on their bellies. It has pale yellow feathers on its lower breast and belly, a black bib, white rump and black tail. Its head is striped with black and white and topped off by a poppy red or crimson crest. Sapsuckers are members of the woodpecker family, and one look at the holes they drill in trees, their classification becomes obvious.

 Yellow-bellied sapsuckers migrate and our region is their winter range. Once tree sap begins to flow in late winter, sapsuckers take advantage of the high sugar concentrations found in some tree saps. My backyard sugar maple is a prime example, its lower circumference riddled with small, evenly spaced drilled holes called sap wells. Maple, birch and Bradford pears are favored because of their soft bark. For healthy trees, these wells cause no harm.

It is almost spring and a pair of pileated woodpeckers have begun their courtship dance. Circling a tree, they promenade up and down while clinging to the trunk. As they dance, their heads thrust forward and back or side to side. It is a dance of incredible intricacy. Pileated woodpeckers mate for life, and soon a new brood will fly forth to fill our forests with their sounds.