The red-shafted flicker is so well known… that any detailed description of its plumage or habits seems superfluous.
– Willard Ayres Eliot, Birds of the Pacific Coast, 1923
Thus spake Eliot. And so it should be. But our acquaintance with birds has ebbed as other facts have flowed in the tide of common knowledge, and now it is easy to find those to whom flickers are not just personal strangers, but an entirely unconceived of possibility. The upside of reduced familiarity, however, is the unjaded sense of novelty when one encounters this most gloriously atypical of woodpeckers. People are excited when they see flickers: fresh eyes, naive in bird lore, embrace it with relish.
Prepare, flicker initiates, for today’s dose of lore – but may your relish be undiminished!
In what ways is the flicker unusual among woodpeckers? In fundamental physiology, the basic ‘pecker patterns are retained: a more or less vertically-oriented body perched upon zygodactylous feet (with two toes forward and two backwards, unlike the standard 3-and-1), stiff tails for tree trunk balancing, sturdy beaks for the excavation of holes, and long tongues for the extraction of insects. And yet they break the mold of our expectations in just as many ways, accustomed as most of us our to our standard issue peckerwoods of black and white (see the overview of our local cast here).
In their most obvious exceptionality, flickers are not black and white. Downy woodpeckers are, hairy woodpeckers are, Nuttall’s woodpeckers are, acorn woodpeckers are, pileated woodpeckers are, and sapsuckers are. Flickers are not. Flickers are armored in copper, with the gray of their heads protruding from their burnished cuirasse above a breastplate of black. That tidy black bib is neatly painted, as are the contrasting black bars of the backside and round spots of the front. In flight, you might notice their white rump patches, reminiscent of those of sapsuckers and acorn woodpeckers. This is an easy-to-see, tell-tale field mark, garnering traditional names such as cotton-rump, cotton-tail, and silver dollar bird. Or even more creative pseudonyms like “xebec,” a small kind of sailing ship identified at a distance by its large spread of white canvas.
The Flicker has the singular honor of having more folknames and names than any other bird that breeds in North America.
– James Kedzie Sayre, North American Bird Folknames and Names, which lists a total of 160 flicker names
But the name that stuck is the most apt. For it is the steady flickering of their red wing feathers that will most likely attract your admiration and reverberate in your memory.
With its matchless array of marked characteristics, any one of which would well deserve the adoption of a concise descriptive name in a species less excentric, no word in the English language would prove more apt than the one it now possesses.
– Frank L. Burns, A Monograph of the Flicker, 1900
Depending on the vintage and taxonomic philosophy of your favored field guide, you may see this bird listed as “Northern Flicker” or broken into its constituent western “Red-shafted” and eastern “Yellow-shafted” variants, now generally considered a subspecies level division. But this is one bird where the official name remains a folkname at the core, a name that originated in real-life acquaintance, rather than a product of patronage or specimen-drawer taxonomy. Those museum specimens may be “spotted woodpeckers” or even “golden wings,” but only the real birds, wild and alive, flicker in flight.
It’s difficult to find suitably glorious photos of red flickering. Many of the most fancy-pants photographers don’t want to share their images. Like this majestic one that doesn’t allow copying or embedding.
As with other woodpeckers, there is a degree of sexual dimorphism, with males the redder of the pair. Most of our small woodpeckers wear their red on their crowns; flickers wear it as a mustache (“malar stripe”). In this they are like the pileated woodpeckers, both adhering to the understandable pattern of males wearing red mustaches. Lady flickers don’t have mustaches. (Lady pileateds actually do, they’re just black.)
This unusual coloring compared to the bulk of American woodpeckers points to two underlying differences, one of habitat and one of habits. In terms of where they live, the various black-and-whites are birds of northern forests: black-and-white-ness is the antithesis of tropical splendor. When you live among the trees of temperate forests and woodlands, clinging to well-shadowed trunks with occasionally forays into the dappled, black and white is effective camouflage.
Flickers are hardy birds that are certainly no strangers to the northlands, but they also thrive in the deserts of the southwest and Central America. Beyond our “red-shafted” and “yellow-shafted” subspecies, there are two others: the “Cuban Flicker” and the “Guatemalan Flicker.” The second species of American flickerdom, the gilded flicker, is a bird of Arizona and Baja. Most black-and-whites would feel out of place nesting in a cactus; flickers take it in stride. They are unusually light colored among American woodpeckers, in part because they are a tribe of unusually hot, open, and southerly origins.
But even when they go north, even when they are found in temperate forests rife with hairy woodpeckers, or red-headeds, or pileateds, even when their habitat is that of the black-and-whites, flickers maintain different habits. They are not primarily feeders on the shadowy trunks, but hunters of the open ground, where earth-toned copper is the more discrete apparel. Those beaks are still capable of digging out a fine nest hole in a rotten snag, but their primary tool is not the pickax but the sticky plumber’s snake they hide inside of it. Woodpecker tongues are generally long; flicker tongues are extravagant.
Down into the ant colonies descends that impressive instrument, probing into the subterranea like a dowitcher or curlew in the tide-fed mud. Reaching down into an unexamined orifice for sightless eating is a behavior that humans have only really perfected recently, in the era of bagged foods and distracting screens to look at, now that we can more or less outsource our food safety and selection protocols to the makers and inspectors of those peanut butter filled pretzels. Flickers and their shorebird peers in probing beat us to this advanced level of feeding by millennia. Their skills are more impressive too, given that their food is alive and would like to escape that inescapable tongue. Are you familiar with Zatoichi, the blind master swordsman of Japanese samurai flicks? Flickers are blind swordsmen and flickers are sword-swallowers: they are never unweaponed and the ants are doomed.
Tongues are for probing, but beaks are still for hammering
This specialized feeding style doesn’t mean that flickers don’t know how to deal with tree trunks and rotten snags as well as any woodpecker. Beyond feeding, there are two main purposes for which woodpeckers peck the wood. The first is the excavation of nest sites. Woodpeckers are the leading group of so-called primary cavity nesters, those who dig the holes, use them for a season, and then move on to a new hole for the next spring, leaving behind their broken-in nurseries for the use of the secondary cavity nesters, including various songbirds of less potent excavatory abilities. Titmice, nuthatches, and chickadees have some digging ability; bluebirds, swallows, and the cavity-nesting ducks have little. The woodpeckers do the work.
This is therefore a crucial ecological role, making the nesting and therefore existence of numerous other birds possible. The holes of small ‘peckers like downies or Nuttall’s can create nesting sites for the small songbirds, while those of the big ‘peckers like flickers and pileateds create nesting sites for bigger, interesting things like wood ducks and hooded mergansers, kestrels and screech owls. In most areas, flickers are the leading maker of big holes, leading to another of their traditional names of “high holer,” sometimes corrupted to “high holder” or simply “high ho.” When next you see a neat, round hole way up in that big old bay, you will know the author: ol’ high ho silver dollar.
You may also have the experience of a flicker choosing your home as a suitable construction site, either with the intention of excavating a nest cavity or simply a winter roosting hole. Only the acorn woodpeckers rival flickers in their taste for human home improvement (improvement for non-humans, that is). Dawson noted this with his typical personal directness back in the 20s:
The bird becomes obsessed by the idea of filling a particular wall full of holes, and no ingenuity of man can deter him.
Well, we’ve invented various defensive measures in the intervening century. The most basic involve shiny, fluttering things. The most goofy is the tapping-sensitive “attack spider” – utterly non-lethal, but distinctly disconcerting. But in the case of a cavity-excavating flicker, the most effective may be putting up a nesting box in the location they’ve targeted for demolition, ideally stocked with some wood shavings for them to toss out to their ideal level of cosiness and then burrow into to their heart’s content.
The second non-gastronomic wood-pecking activity is also tied to the nesting season: making music. More precisely, woodpecker “drumming” consists of rapid series of beats on a resonant surface to create an audible signal of territory, akin to the singing of songbirds. In human-proximate areas the chosen drumming stations may go beyond the traditional resonant soundboxes of dead trees to include similarly resounding objects of human construction, such as houses, pipes, and metal utility boxes. This hammering has earned yet another folk name: “red-hammer,” or in its more common eastern version, “yellow-hammer.”
Display hammering often alternates like this with long runs of “keek” calls.
Those long keek series deserve some attention as well. They are primarily a spring sound, a sound of territorial declaration. Be aware though that the presence of local breeding flickers is often obscured and confused by our abundance of wintering flickers, who may well be present in the Bay Area through April or so before heading north. But when those northerners receive our shipment of flickers, they are overjoyed to hear that call returning to their quiet woods:
Ah! There is the note of the first flicker, a prolonged, monotonous wick-wick-wick-wick-wick-wick, etc., or, if you please, quick-quick, heard far over and through the dry leaves. But how that single sound peoples and enriches all the woods and fields! They are no longer the same woods and fields that they were. This note really quickens what was dead. It seems to put a life into withered grass and leaves and bare twigs, and henceforth the days shall not be as they have been. It is as when a family, your neighbors, return to an empty house after a long absence, and you hear the cheerful hum of voices and the laughter of children, and see the smoke from the kitchen fire. The doors are thrown open, and children go screaming through the hall. So the flicker dashes through the aisles of the grove, throws up a window here and cackles out it, and then there, airing the house. It makes its voice ring up-stairs and down-stairs, and so, as it were, fits it for its habitation and ours, and takes possession. It is as good as a housewarming to all nature.
– Thoreau’s Journal, March 1858
It is like the note of an alarm-clock set last fall so as to wake Nature up at exactly this date. Up up up up up up up up up!
– The Journal, March 1859
High-holer or red-hammer – it is good to know birds by their visible works and ecological contribution, by their appearance and their sound. To know a mere name on paper is a first step in acquaintance – fine, you could take the class attendance from a list: “Flicker, Northern. Present!” But to know someone by the work he leaves behind, by a momentary flicker of departing red or the distant echo of an unseen voice – then you can begin to claim a closer knowledge and friendship.
Flickers in winter, the trumpet and the flame
The high holes and territorial drumming are activities of the nesting season. And we do have nesting flickers here, in areas of sufficient mature trees to provide suitable locations. (A lack of nesting sites is often the limiting factor in the population of cavity-nesting birds, especially given human proclivities for the removal of dead trees, which often provide the best and most easily excavatable nesting sites.) But we have far more flickers in winter, when birds descend from the north, descend from the mountains, spread out from the woods and scatter through the lowlands, through areas of progressively fewer and smaller trees until they have completed the infiltration of even the most weakly enarbored of suburbs.
At this time, our main season of neighborhood flickers, the holes and drumming are not in evidence. But though they lay down their drums, flickers never forsake their trumpets: the most familiar of flicker calls is a stentorian KLEEER, a resounding bugle through the woods or town streets. “The voice often breaks at start,” remarks the knowledgeable Mr. Pieplow. It is a mighty call and you can understand such breaking as they push the limits of achievable volume: you can hear it a mile off, downslurred and echoing.
Nor do they ever lay aside their flickers of red. This is no transient breeding plumage, but their steady glowing essence, a flame within their burnished armor even in the coldest winter. You may first spot the flicker as a dark silhouette against a cloudy sky, a familiar profile above the canopy, but one deprived of color in the glowering monochrome of the season of storms. But as the trees of our California streets turn red, as the leaves of sweetgum and pistache glow with their imported splendor, look for this bird to fly, blinking in sudden paprikan bursts that warm your eyes and spirits.
Our flickers are birds of winter. But they carry the desert heat tucked inside their wings.
Header photo by Mick Thompson
We have one in the neighborhood, a beauty, and with that loud but lovely voice.
An extraordinary essay on an extraordinary bird – thank you, Jack!
Eloquent expression and info … building into a book?
Thanks Jack! – Donna
We have one who just showed up in our backyard here in Winnipeg this Spring, beautiful bird!
I have a nesting pair in my Calgary Alberta yard. They are fun to watch with the drumming and mating sounds they make. They are not a very shy bird either. I can get to about 10 feet comfortably without them moving. The sounds they make are amazing and great to listen to while I’m sitting on my deck. So fun to watch
So beautiful, as usual, Jack! I hope to see them soon! Betsy