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| The beautiful redheaded woodpecker |
speared their food. Why else would you keep ramming your beaky lips into a tree if you don’t get food, right? Turns out they have an especially long and clever tongue. A couple of inches long. After drilling a hole, they stick in the tongue and wrap it around their prey. They can get a pretty good grip because they have very sticky spit and the tongue is covered with bristles. (See? One more thing to be grateful for––no bristles on your tongue.)
What are they extracting from the trees? Insects and grubs for the most part. If you savor escargot, you'd probably be able to eat grubs. The rest of us will count our blessings that we don't have to crunch down on one of those things. That impressive woodpecker tongue is also useful for drinking; we often have woodpeckers drinking from our hummingbird feeders. They love fruit and nuts as well, but nothing so much as a snifter of tree sap after dinner.
Some woodpeckers drill to forage for food, others are seeking nesting sites. Depending on the type of bird, you can find small holes, huge holes, or a series of tiny holes around the tree. To get a good grip for drilling, woodpeckers have a strong, stiff tail to brace themselves against the tree. Otherwise, the recoil would be terrific, and there would be woodpeckers shooting off of trees throughout the forest. You would think the tree might be the worse for wear, but it actually benefits from having pests removed.
When I watch a woodpecker head hammer repeatedly on a tree trunk, I always wonder why they don’t suffer from Shaken Woodpecker Syndrome. They are exerting significant force, and may achieve in the neighborhood of 15-16 whacks a second. If they peck on your roof and you are inside the house, it’s louder than a drum rim-shot. Thank heavens we have plenty of trees to distract them. In fact these birds' heads are designed to take a beating. Nature has made the brain-to-skull ratio a little different than ours.
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| Woodpecker brain has more room for error |
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| Our brain is close to the skull |
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| Red bellied woodpecker (Don't ask me-I didn't name it) |
If you have done any wood chopping, you know what happens if you don’t wear your safety goggles. Woodpeckers wearing goggles––what a wonderful thought! But instead, to keep out the flying sawdust, they go with special third eyelids to protect the eyes and feathers to cover their nostril slits.
Once those cavities are drilled out for nests, woodpeckers must defend the home front. Animals without built-in jackhammers are thrilled to find such housing and try to become squatters.
There are a couple of hundred kinds of woodpeckers ranging from smaller than your hand to over 20 inches. In addition to the redhead and the red-bellied, these are the ones that amuse us all year round.
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| The downy– |
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| or is it a hairy- |
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| or is it a ladderback? Nah, it's a downy. |
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| Yellow-bellied sapsucker |
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| Flicker feasting on hackberries |
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Eastern flicker |
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| Flicker flaunting it outside our upstairs window |
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| The astounding pileated seen at a great distance Woody Woodpecker lives! |
To watch the pileated woodpecker mating ritual:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWznm2HA1hc
To hear the pileated mating call:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxXkG4mqeWQ&feature=related
To compare downy-hairy-ladderback w'peckers:
