By Nicky Boyette – Survival takes us down curious pathways. Aardvarks eat ants, snakes live in tunnels in the ground and woodpeckers bang their beaks on tree trunks looking for bugs and larva. Woodpeckers are not selective eaters. They eat insects and spiders along with grubs, and they nibble on sap. Their adaptable appetites help mitigate insect invasions among trees in their neighborhoods.
There is a reason for the name. Woodpeckers drill holes in tree trunks by pounding their long, pointy three-levels-deep beaks onto tree trunks. The goal is to find bugs or create a drain for sap. Woodpeckers sometimes dip an insect into sap before eating it.
A woodpecker beak consists of a bony inner layer overlaid by porous bone covered by an outer layer of keratin. To protect a woodpecker’s brain from injury from the head banging, nature has employed a clever strategy. First of all, woodpecker brains are relatively small and do not have much room to move inside woodpecker skulls, which are made of pressure-absorbing and pressure-dispersing bone. Studies indicate woodpeckers distribute the strain from each drumbeat throughout the body with minimal impact on the brain.
Wait for the drumroll
According to the Sialis website, woodpeckers communicate through their drumming. A rapid drumroll of pecking would be to announce territory or attract a mate. A downy woodpecker can peck up to 17 pecks per second for almost two seconds. Less dramatic drumming, also called tapping, probably means the bird is probing for something to eat. Pairs might drum together.
Different species drum in different distinctive patterns, and a bird will peck in stops and starts because the hammering heats up its brain. Woodpeckers also have a special membrane to protect their eyes from flying wood chips. With only two exceptions, all woodpecker species have four toes – the first and fourth pointing backward and the middle two pointing forward.
Where to call home
Different species prefer different habitats and some are maybe too particular. Downy woodpeckers, the smallest North American woodpecker, will nest almost anywhere, including woods, tall grasses in fields, beside streams, in parks and neighborhoods, and even in holes in the walls of buildings.
Red-bellied woodpeckers prefer dead trees in the woods for nesting, but will use trees with soft wood or even a landscaped area where there are few trees. Red headed woodpeckers require standing dead trees or utility poles. The red-cockaded woodpecker drills its holes exclusively in old-growth living pines, a significantly diminishing habitat, and one estimate is that the current population is about one percent of its peak period. They have been extirpated in Missouri, Tennessee and Kentucky and apparently northern Arkansas. Conservation efforts began 50 years ago to protect its nesting areas from being harvested, and birds are being re-introduced in a wildlife management area in Florida.
The ivory-billed woodpecker was less fortunate. It would nest only in dead trees in old growth forests in swampy areas. Because they had not been seen for a while, a team in 1935 explored a swampy area in Tensas Parish, Louisiana, called the Singer Tract. They found an ivory-billed nest high in a maple tree. Arthur Allen, who had founded the Cornell University Department of Ornithology, camped out nearby and studied the pair for two weeks. His work prompted follow-up research in this area.
This tract of land was owned by the Singer Company. It was reportedly the last remaining old growth tract of its kind in the South, and Singer sold logging rights to the Chicago Mill and Lumber Company. The Audubon Society tried to strike a deal to protect the trees, but, according to the Cornell article, the lumber company responded by accelerating its rate of harvest, leaving a clearcut swath through the marshland.
By 1939, researcher Jim Tanner, who followed Allen to Tensas Parish and studied there for two years, reported there might be no more than two dozen ivorybills left in the United States. By the 1950s, they were considered extinct.
But in February 2004, the birding world was jolted by a reported sighting in the Big Woods area of eastern Arkansas, a swampy extension of the Mississippi River delta 100 miles or so north of Tensas Parish. Soon enough others claimed sightings, and even video and audio evidence was captured, but some ornithologists are still skeptical these sightings might have been the similar pileated woodpecker. So, the status of the ivory-billed woodpecker is not decided, though it is certainly endangered.
Arkansas woodpeckers
There are 210 woodpecker species worldwide, found everywhere except Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea, Madagascar and the poles. The National Geographic Field Guide lists 24 woodpeckers, flickers and sapsuckers in the United States.
Arkansas is home to eight woodpecker species and allies: redheaded, red-bellied, downy, hairy, pileated and ivory-billed woodpeckers, northern flicker and yellow-bellied sapsucker. The red-cockaded might also remain in spots near Mena or in the southern part of the state, but its population has been seriously declining for years.
The hairy woodpecker is found in the main population centers in Arkansas and hardly anywhere else in our state. There have been sightings in Little Rock, Texarkana and Mena and along the I-49 corridor. It is a medium-sized, nine-inch tall bird with a white patch down its back contrasted by dark wings with white spots. A mature male will have a red spot on the back of its head.
The very similar downy woodpecker is three inches smaller and a bit more widespread around the state. Downies will visit a backyard feeder or suet cage in a mixed flock of chickadees, nuthatches and titmice. The Eureka Springs area is a downy hotspot.
The red-bellied woodpecker does not have a red belly. A reddish tinge appears toward the bottom of its underside during the winter, but nothing like the red band running across the top of its head and extending around the back of its neck. The red-bellied is a mid-size bird with black and white speckled feathers on its back and wings. It is common year-round in spots all over the state, and it is known for helping to control infestations of the emerald ash borer.
Almost as common in Arkansas is the red headed woodpecker that does have the right name. It has a striking red head, a black back and white breast. It is a remarkable spectacle when it flies with the red head, black neck, white patch on its back and white patches on black wings. It doesn’t bore holes in trees but instead catches prey flying by or finds food on the ground. It might store a bug in a small hole in a tree for eating later.
The yellow-bellied sapsucker is an example of ornithologists having too much fun in a committee meeting. It is slightly smaller than a red-bellied woodpecker and its belly has a yellowish tinge, but not like a goldfinch. Its back is mottled black, gray and white. It drills holes to get to the sap, and can drill enough holes to kill a tree. In orchards they tend to be drawn to certain trees leaving the others alone. They are common, though inconsistent, in our part of Arkansas.
The Northern flicker is one of the most spectacularly ornamented birds in our area, and they are present throughout most of the state. Flickers west of the Rockies are called red-shafted flickers because their underparts flash red when they fly by. East of the Rockies they are yellow-shafted. Their backs are brown with black and gray specks with a white patch toward the bottom. Their bellies are white with black spots. Their heads are ornately colored with a blue-gray on top with a red splash on the back of the head. At more than 12 inches, they are larger than other woodpeckers except for the pileated. Seven or eight of them will swoop from the right side of the forest toward the left prompting another group of seven or eight to fly back to the right, and they will continue this game for awhile. Blue jays will sometimes play with them.
The pileated woodpecker is the largest North American woodpecker (except for maybe the ivory-billed). They live year-round in our part of the state. A red-bellied woodpecker might be nine inches tall, but a pileated is 16 inches or more. They have a prominent red crest atop a black head with white stripes above and below the eyes, a prehistoric call that reverberates through Ozark forests, and they are imposing creatures gliding through the trees because of their size. However, they are not necessarily shy and will grab onto a sumac branch at the edge of a clearing and hang upside down eating berries.
The ivory-billed woodpecker might be gone, and the red-cockaded diminishing, but there are efforts being made in other states to mitigate its decline.
Native Americans in the northwestern United States revered woodpeckers enough to carve their likenesses onto totem poles. Walter Lantz was inspired enough to create a popular cartoon hero modeled after a pileated woodpecker. Trees appreciate the woodpecker’s mitigating effect on insect infestations, and the spiritual meaning we can get from woodpeckers is to see value everywhere, even in dead trees. Another obvious lesson – to survive, use your head.