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The Naturalist: |
Pileated Woodpeckers |
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The Naturalist: |
Pileated Woodpeckers |
The Pileated Woodpecker, Drycopus pileatus, is a shy, fairly uncommon bird that resides in forests across the eastern United States, Canada, and parts of the western states. This crow-sized bird features an eye-catching red crest, a black body, white under wing feathers, and two white stripes that run from the base of their long, black bill, across their face, and down their neck to their sides. Males also boast a red 'mustache' below the stripe. Pileated Woodpeckers are often confused with the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, which is now considered extinct. Ivory-billeds were larger than the Pileated, with their white stripe running down their back, rather than their front, white wing-tips, a black fore crest, and an ivory-colored bill. In the United States, Ivory-billed Woodpeckers ranged from the Ohio River Valley to east Texas, the Gulf Coast, and into Florida. They would never have been sighted in New Hampshire. For more information on Ivory-billed Woodpeckers, visit www.birds.cornell.edu/ivory/
Despite their conspicuous appearance, you often hear a Pileated Woodpecker before you see it. Their location call (the noise they make to find their mate) is a loud, deliberate cuck, cuck, cuck! Both the male and the female also have a call of yucka, yucka, yucka that is very irregular and noisy. Pileated Woodpeckers also drum on trees. When they do this, it sounds very much like the tree is being hit with a large, wooden mallet.
Pileated Woodpeckers drum on trees to claim territory and attract a mate. They drill into trees to search for food and hollow out a nesting or roosting cavity. These woodpeckers eat mostly insects (carpenter ants and other wood-boring insects being on the top of the list) but they also eat seeds and nuts. They are sometimes attracted to suet feeders (an excellent mixture for them is suet with pecan and walnut meats blended in). Apart from drilling holes in trees to get at their food, Pileated Woodpeckers also strip bark from dead trees and even dig in the ground. Contrary to popular belief, Pileated Woodpeckers don't kill trees when they feed at them. Since their main food source is wood-boring insects, the presence of the woodpecker on the tree usually means that the tree is already suffering from insect damage.
Unlike their feeding holes, which are long and oval-shaped, the Pileated Woodpecker's nesting hollows are large and round. Both the male and the female woodpecker hollow out several roosting cavities (located in dead or dying trees fifteen to eighty-five feet above the ground) and each spend the night in separate holes. The male roosts in the actual nesting hole before the eggs are laid. The female lays three to eight white eggs, which the male incubates only during the night, while the female does the same in the daytime. In New Hampshire eggs are usually laid in late April or early May. The eggs hatch after fifteen to eighteen days. The newly hatched chicks are altricial-totally dependent upon the parents-and stay in the nest for twenty-six to twenty-eight days. During this time, the parents feed them regurgitated insects and grubs.
The Pileated Woodpecker prefers dense, mature forests to inhabit, but they are adapting well to human intrusion and becoming more and more common in second growth and disturbed woodlands. They are, however, still vulnerable to habitat loss by forest fragmentation and logging.
The population of the Pileated Woodpecker has increased in the last few decades due to old farmland returning to forest. A significant increase of this species has been noticed in New Hampshire for this very reason. In the early 1900s much of the state had been cleared for farming and Pileated Woodpeckers were uncommon, especially south of the White Mountains. As farmlands were abandoned and forests re-grew, the Pileated Woodpecker population expanded. According to the Atlas of Breeding Birds in New Hampshire, conducted in the early 1980s, this woodpecker is now widely distributed throughout the state with the exception of the southeastern corner.