Our woodpeckers are a diverse and interesting lot, but as a group they can be recognized by their black and white plumage (with males often distinguished by additional red on their heads) and their habit of moving up and down tree trunks and limbs with a clinging, rather than upright perching posture. We have seven regularly occurring species in Novato. The first four featured below are the relatively normal and quotidian lot: mid-sized, black and white, backyard feeder-visiting birds such as the downy, hairy, Nuttall’s, and acorn woodpecker. The following batch of three includes our less common or less typical species: the red-breasted sapsucker, northern flicker, and pileated woodpecker.
Woodpeckers in the backyard
The first four common local woodpeckers described below (Nuttall’s, downy, hairy, and acorn woodpeckers) happily come to feeders offering nuts or suet. They will also eat sunflower, mealworms, and even jelly or sugar water intended for orioles or hummingbirds – they aren’t hard to attract if they are in the area. Generally speaking, the more trees there are around your neighborhood, especially native oaks, the more abundance and variety of woodpeckers you will have. Treeless neighborhoods won’t have any, a moderate dusting of middle-aged ornamentals might garner a few downies, and residential areas that are integrated into native oak woodland could easily have all four of the feeder visitors.
While some people fear that putting out food for woodpeckers will invite a swarm of destructive birds bent on tearing apart their home, this is extremely unlikely. As with any feeder, the primary effect of supplemental food is to make the resident birds more visible, not create populations of birds that were not there to start with. The main origin of these tales of destruction are acorn woodpeckers, who will create colonial caches of acorns in dead trees, old utility poles, or houses with appropriately permeable siding: other species don’t do this. If there is a colony of acorn woodpeckers next to your home, and your home presents a suitable granary structure, then you could run into trouble – but feeders will not amplify this. The birds are there or they aren’t! If you do have trouble with acorn woodpeckers damaging your home, there are some defensive measures you can take.
Nuttall’s Woodpecker
Identify: One of the elementary keys to identifying our five small-to-medium, black-and-white woodpeckers is to look at their back patterns. Nuttall’s is the one with horizontal white bars forming a “ladder-backed” pattern (the official “ladder-backed woodpecker” is a close relative found in southern California and other southwestern desert areas). Nuttall’s are fairly small – just a smidge larger than our most petite downy woodpeckers. Only males have a red cap.
Get acquainted: The Nuttall’s woodpecker is a California specialty which barely extends beyond the state borders, but they are one of the more common woodpeckers in Marin and come readily to backyard feeders. They are classic residents of oak woodland, but also do moderately well with the mixed trees of typical residential neighborhoods. Nuttall’s woodpeckers have a simple but distinctive call of two loud, fast syllables – pitik! – which generally stands out from the single-noted calls typical of downy and hairy woodpeckers. They often give this call in flight, handily alerting you to their arrival or departure.
Downy and Hairy Woodpeckers
Identify: These two woodpeckers have a notoriously similar appearance and are often confused. Both have a large vertical white patch down the middle of their back (i.e. between the wings) and males of both species have a red patch on their heads. Downies are smaller, have a short beak, and usually have a few black spots on their white outer tail feathers. Hairy woodpeckers are bigger, have a bulkier beak that is almost as long as their head, and have plain white outer tail feathers. Visit this page from Cornell’s Project Feederwatch for more comparisons.
Kirill Ignatyev
Get acquainted: These are our two standard, run-of-the-mill North American woodpeckers, both present across the country. Downies are the more common yard bird around here, but you may also attract hairies if you live in a more wooded area with mature trees. Both readily visit feeders if present. What do their names mean? While precise and consistent information is a little tricky to track down, the most common explanation seems to point to the different quality of those white feathers down the middle of the back, which are apparently soft and downy in the smaller bird while contrastingly long and hair-like in the bigger one.
Although these two species look similar, are named to differentiate themselves from each other, and are grouped together here, they are not actually the closest of relatives, with the downy actually more closely related to our similarly-sized Nuttall’s woodpecker. Convergent evolution!
Acorn Woodpecker
Identify: Acorns have all black backs and clown faces. Easy! Our other small woodpeckers have various kinds of white patterns on their backs and lack the distinctive white facepaint. One other trick with these guys compared to the preceding three species is that both male and female acorn woodpeckers have red on their heads. On males, a larger red patch extends all the way to the white forehead, while on females the red is only on the rear of the head, with a black area intervening between the red and the white forehead.
Get acquainted: For much more on acorn woodpeckers, see my full essay on the Harlequin Carpenter.
Acorn woodpeckers come readily to peanut and suet feeders, but are not present in all yards. Their natural habitat is usually dependent on native oaks and their acorns, as their name suggests, but they will also use other trees, notably palms. In general though, you need oaks for acorn woodpeckers.
Acorn woodpeckers are the textbook example of a colonial breeding bird. (Literally: there aren’t many birds that do this, so these local celebrities get to be featured in ecology textbooks across the country.) Unlike the majority of our backyard birds, which divide into pairs during the breeding season, acorn woodpeckers will live in larger colonies, with several non-breeding birds helping to raise the young. This sociability translates into numerous easily observed traits: you are more likely to see large groups of these woodpeckers compared to our other species, they chatter to each other a lot more than most other species, and they assemble and guard collective granaries of acorns. These granaries can be very impressive, with thousands of acorns tightly wedged into holes in dead trees, soft old utility poles, or sometimes in houses, to the homeowner’s dismay.
Generalizing Interlude Before the Less Quotidian Three
When most casual people hear the word woodpecker, they are naturally guided towards thoughts of pecking on wood, or (somewhat more precisely), a hammering either destructive or rhythmic upon tree trunks. There is some truth in this. Woodpeckers are adapted for forceful beak-striking, a technique some might use for breaking open dead wood in search of insects or for cracking open acorns. Many also performing drumming, the woodpecker equivalent of song, in which they sound a rapid patter on the most resonant surface they can find (hollow trees, metal pipes) as a means of declaring their breeding territory.
Of course, it is easy to make fun of creatures that pound their heads against hard surfaces:
In writing an article about woodpeckers, I am legally obligated to direct you to information on how they roll their tongues up inside their skulls and have special adaptations to cushion their brains from the pounding. Here you go: Why Does a Woodpecker Not Bash Its Brains In When It Pecks? and another article on the same subject with crazy flicker tongue illustrations. I will note the disclaimer that head-pounding is not their only, or even necessarily their primary feeding technique. Our petite downy woodpecker is more likely to glean insects larvae and such from leaf and tree surfaces rather than engaging in major demolition, while the atypical northern flicker mostly feeds on ants and other insects on the ground, grabbing them with his long tongue like an anteater.
The other obligatory science fact to share with you relates to woodpecker feet. Their toes are arranged in a zygodactylic pattern, meaning that two toes point forward and two backwards. This is better for their clinging lifestyle than the more typical songbird pattern of anisodactylism, in which three toes point forwards and one backwards.
Is there anything else I’d like to tell you about woodpeckers? The common name is a nice, understandable, long-standing traditional one going back for several hundred years of the English language. The French pic and the Spanish pico are very similar to our English pecker (they have woodpeckers in Europe too, in case you were wondering). In Spanish, they also have another nicely relatable name for woodpeckers: carpintero.
Red-breasted Sapsucker
Identify: Sapsuckers have some areas of clear continuity with the preceding birds. They are a similar medium size, with plumage of black, white, and red. Their main difference of plumage consists in the much greater amount of red, a rather smudgy wash over the majority of their head (compared to just small segments of the caps on the first four woodpeckers above). A few additional bits of practically informative context: sapsuckers don’t visit feeders and they are only here in the winter (roughly October-April).
Get acquainted: As Falstaff is to Shakespeare, so sapsuckers are to woodpeckers. Very roughly speaking. By which I mean that their name is also clearly based on a noun + verb pairing and you might want to know what exactly “sapsucking” is all about. The signs of this bird’s devotion to the sapsucking pastime is perhaps the single most distinctive visual evidence of any local bird. If you want to start reading bird signs, noticing sapsucker traces is like learning the ABC. Have you ever seen something like this?
That’s right, those generally straightish rows of shallow holes are created by none other than this rather shy and often overlooked bird. In fact, they are easily overlooked in part because their vocation of hole drilling tends to keep them close to the trunks and main limbs, where they are often concealed by foliage. They are also pretty quiet birds.
The primary purpose of these holes is indeed to create sap wells; trees commonly exude sap as a defensive mechanism when pierced, punctured, or invaded. There has been some speculation as to the degree to which the sapsuckers are actually benefiting from eating the insects attracted to the sap, rather than primarily the sap itself, but the preponderance of opinion seems to be that the bugs are a welcome side dish to the sappy main course. These holes are generally not too damaging to trees: some degree of parasitism is part and parcel of tree status (as the biggest living things in the woods, trees convert solar energy into myriad forms that sustain other plant and animal life on multitudinous levels – that’s why they are so important).
Northern Flicker
Identify: A large and distinctive woodpecker – not black and white, but brown with a black bib, black belly spots, and black stripes on the wings and back. Males have a red mustache stripe (ladies don’t have mustaches, naturally). Look for the bright red shafts flickering in their wings in flight.
Get acquainted: See much more on flickers in my full essay.
Rather than excavating rotten wood or poking around tree crevices to find insects like other woodpeckers, flickers often search for prey on the ground. They’re basically flying anteaters. I mean just look at this tongue!
After the sapsucker, the flicker is our most notably migratory woodpecker. Although some are present here all year round, many descend from the mountains and colder regions in the winter, substantially swelling local numbers. In winter, they are commonly seen in yards and scattered throughout most woodland habitats: listen for their loud, ringing keeeerrr! calls resounding through the woods from miles away. They will very occasionally visit feeders, more often will visit birdbaths, and if you do happen to have local residents (rather than just winter visitors) will also use a nest box fairly willingly.
Pileated Woodpecker
Identify: Our largest and most impressive woodpecker, nearly crow-sized. Just as some guy said of the danger of mistaking a condor for a turkey vulture that “if you’re not sure you’re looking at a condor, you’re not,” it is also pretty reliable that “if you’re not sure you’re looking at a pileated woodpecker, you’re not.” They’re huge!
Plumage-wise, their backs are entirely black, with no bars or stripes. Both males and females have red on their caps, but only males have a red mustache stripe (females have a black mustache stripe).
Get acquainted: Pileateds are most common in the county’s mature conifer forests such as Point Reyes’ Inverness Ridge or on Mount Tam. Here in Novato, we have one bit of conifer forest at Indian Tree Open Space Preserve where they are sometimes seen. Pileateds can also be found in lower densities in relatively dense and continuous forests dominated by coast live oaks: they are sometimes seen in this habitat at Olompali, Indian Valley, Big Rock Ridge, or China Camp.
More properly, that’s a pilos, the Greek version, as shown here in some fine 4th century BC red figure painting. Photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons.
“Pileated” means “capped,” from this nice little pointy cap called a pileus that Roman slaves got when they were freed. On the one hand, “pileated” is a somewhat obscure and relatively meaningless word to most modern humans. On the other hand, using a fancy latinate word sounds rather grander – and appropriately so – compared to simply calling them “capped” woodpeckers. Or compared to our mundane-sounding “downy” and “hairy” and so forth.
In addition to being big, pileateds are also loud. Their loud wuk wuk wuks can carry quite a ways, and may alert you to their presence long before you see them. Their foraging activity as they pound at soft wood with periodic heavy hammer blows is also often distinctly louder than that of small woodpeckers. Learning to recognize the big pounding and the wuk wuk wuks below will help you to find them as they roam through the forest.
Very interesting & most helpful – thanks again, Jack!
Eloquent expression and well-researched info … building into a book?
Thanks Jack! – Donna
Good info and comparisons… Great photos!
Thanks Jack…
Dorothy
We have these handsome birds here in suburban San Rafael in the Forbes neighborhood. They visit our magnolia tree when it is seeding. I think they might enjoy the bright red seeds of the seed pods, although I know they favor carpenter ants. They also have nests in the sycamore trees that are planted along Center St. Last spring, it was hard to miss the sound the chicks popping out of their holes.