Can We Talk about Woodpeckers?

This is a very good time of year to talk about woodpeckers. It's the best time of year to watch them, with no leaves to hide them, and with feeders luring them in, right to our yards.

I had a red-bellied woodpecker years ago who I called Ruby, for the little red feathers on her forehead. She became incredibly tame, almost like a pet. It was Ruby, hitting my studio window in 2009, who inspired my crop netting window screen, placed about 10" out from the windows on a PVC frame, that has saved countless lives in the years since. It's normally all but invisible. Only occasionally does a wet snow give me this view from the studio!

To find out how to screen your windows with crop netting (trust me, I can photograph right through it!), go here: https://bwdmagazine.com/downloads/JZ_COL_True_Nature.pdf

 I thought I was seeing Ruby's ghost when this bejeweled female (see her tiny red bindi?) showed up just outside the studio window. Lovely! 

 

This is one of the reddest red-bellies I've ever beheld. He's absolutely suffused with red! And really has a red belly. Generally when you see extra color, you can guess that a bird is older, or has more testosterone than the rest, or both. I've been looking for this gentleman and haven't seen him since I took this photo.

But that's OK. I've got plenty of glam woodpeckers to admire this winter. I'd love to think that this peanut and suet loving adult female yellow-bellied sapsucker is the same little gal I've had since she showed up in her brown weeds as a juvenile in November 2018. She'd be in her fifth winter now, and I think this brilliant plumage she's sporting lines up with that pretty well. She acts the same, uses the same perches; perches very close to my studio window and is totally unperturbed by me moving and photographing her just inside. 

She is a lot less aggressive than some sapsuckers I've observed, sharing the Lifelong Suet Feeder with a Carolina chickadee

and taking her own sweet time when a male hairy woodpecker (who is just about exactly her size) shows up. 

She even shares it peacefully with a downy woodpecker. The Lifelong Suet Feeder is made right here in Ohio by my friend Link Llewellyn. It's not cheap, but no raccoon is ever going to get suet out of it, and you can take it apart, wipe it off, and chuck the whole thing in the dishwasher. Definitely the cleanest way to feed suet, keeping the fat off the feathers, and that and the coon proof features is the whole point for me.

I'm so happy to have these gorgeous woodpeckers here. Even had a yellow-shafted flicker drilling for ants in the yard today, January 15!  Woodpeckers are so animated, such fun to watch, and so easy to attract with suet and peanut halves. (Except for flickers, who resist my efforts to charm them). 

And they hate starlings, too!

While Oscar was here, the queen of woodpeckers made an appearance just off the feeding area. It was so wonderful to show this majestic to him from the warmth of the studio, to watch him watching her through binoculars. 

It's a pileated, and that golden-brown forehead says it's a female. 

In all the years I've fed woodpeckers, I've never had a pileated come in to eat. I keep a regular suet cage as well as the fancy Lifetime suet feeders, and I keep hoping that one day I'll look out to see a monstrous crow-sized woodpecker clinging to the suet feeder or hitching up the post. I can dream!

From left: Downy, red-bellied, hairy.

Until then, I'm happy with what I have. I keep trying to snag the perfect woodpecker combo. I love comparing sizes between hairy and red-bellied, hairy and downy. 

When you see them together (hairy on the left, below; downy on the right) it's such fun to wonder how these not-very-closely related woodpeckers evolved nearly identical plumage. Get this: they aren't even in the same genus any more; hairy has been put in genus Leuconotopicus, while the downy stays in Picoides. The going theory is that downies are hairy mimics. One study by Cornell University's Elliot Miller postulates that the downy is trying to look like the more aggressive hairy for some dominance advantage that is not clear to me. Why would a downy woodpecker need to mimic a hairy? Are hairies poisonous to eat? (I'm only half kidding here. Birds are weird, and so is science, and that's why I love them both).

It's just another of the mysteries that common birds have all locked up. I like wondering about them.

If you do, too, subscribe to BWD Magazine here.  I write a column and few other things for every issue, and help edit it, too. The March/April 2023 issue is in final production! and psst...I know the cover artist...