Unless you are color blind, the color red attracts quick attention. It's hard to miss a Red-headed Woodpecker in your backyard or, for that reason, anyplace you happen to see one. This robin-sized woodpecker has a brilliant red head, neck, and throat, white trailing wing feathers, rump and under body, and black back, leading wing feathers, wing tips, and tail. As soon as this beautiful bird opens its wings and flies off, the rush of white off sets the black and red of the rest of the body. I cannot think of a more striking 3-colored bird in our region. Red-headed Woodpeckers are 7.5 to 9 inches long and have a 16.5 inch wing span. Like other woodpeckers, they are master carvers and excavate their nest and roost cavities in dead trees, often called snags by birders. They prefer to breed along forest edges and in deciduous trees so they are more often found along the edges of mixed hardwood and coniferous forests than pure stands of pines. However, they tend to winter in dense hardwood stands and are often difficult to find in the winter. If I have to find a Red-headed Woodpecker, the first place I will look is in city parks with large, scattered trees with lots of dead wood in them. When searching for any woodpecker, I listen for the tell tale pecking. All woodpeckers peck for three reasons - establish territories, excavate cavities, and find insects, especially grubs, in wood. Drumming is the term used to describe the pecking sound made when woodpeckers are establishing territories. In some cases, experts can identify the drummer by the sound but I rarely can tell the differences between woodpeckers based on their drumming. This drumming can be especially disturbing when it is done on the tin on the side of a house! The call of the Red-headed Woodpecker is described as "tchur - tchur" or "queark" or "queaah" depending on the expert you consult. So, the best thing to do is watch the bird and listen to its call and check the call on the internet by searching for Red-headed Woodpecker. If you see a woodpecker in the late spring and summer that looks like a Red-headed Woodpecker but has a blackish-brown head, you are surely looking at a fledgling Red-headed Woodpecker. By winter, it will molt its first set of feathers and the new set of feathers will include the striking red head, neck and throat. What do Red-headed Woodpeckers eat? They are described as being the most omnivorous woodpeckers in North America. They eat beech and oak mast, seeds, berries, insects, bird eggs, and mice! They have a habit of catching live grasshoppers and wedging them into crevices so tightly that they cannot escape before the woodpecker returns for fresh meat. They also "fly catch," that is they will fly from the side of a tree or a branch to catch insects flying nearby. Red-headed Woodpeckers do store food and do hide it in cracks in wood and fence posts and under tree bark and roof shingles. Red-headed Woodpeckers are found in the eastern half of the USA and adjacent southern areas of Canada. They breed in the northern most areas but winter to the south in milder climates. They occur throughout what most folks call the piney woods region of the Deep South. Red-headed Woodpeckers are described as declining in numbers throughout North America. One reason is competition for nest sites with the introduced European Starling which is a cavity nester but uses cavities excavated by other birds. This is a problem in and around urban areas where large flocks of starlings occur. Removal of snags for forest management and safety and aesthetic reasons in suburban and urban areas also reduces nesting sites regardless of competition for cavities. But, one forestry problem, beaver dams and ponds, seem to benefit Red-headed Woodpeckers by creating snags in flooded forests where the woodpeckers quickly colonize the snags, usually far from starling concentrations! I was fascinated by the classy Red-headed Woodpeckers around my boyhood south Baton Rouge neighborhood. They would come to feeders there and we are treated to what my wife calls "woodies" at our home on Cotile Lake in northwestern Rapides Parish at our feeders here. As a child, I always thought that the cartoon character Woody Woodpecker was patterned after a Red-headed Woodpecker. A few years ago, I was disappointed to learn that Woody's creator Walter Lantz used the Pileated Woodpecker as Woody's model. And, after comparing the call of the Red-headed Woodpecker and Pileated Woodpecker with Woody's chattering laugh, I can understand the relationship. There is one other woodpecker in our region with the classy white trailing edge wing feathers and red-head of the Red-headed Woodpecker. It is the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. Ivory-bills are almost twice as large as red-heads and have a red crest in males. Their continued existence is a topic of heated debate so you are much more likely to see a Red-headed Woodpecker at your backyard feeder, in a nearby park, or from a deer stand than an Ivory-billed Woodpecker! Jay V. Huner |
