Woodpecker-Information-Articles-Stories-Cartoons-Animations

Introduction

Woodpecker

Woodpeckers are found all over the world except in Madagascar and Australia. Woodpeckers make their nest holes in a tree. Each year before they lay eggs, they peck out a new home with their beak that is effective as a chisel. They peck or hammer for seven to eight hours a day picking up insects from the tree bark with their long tongue for refreshment. They have strong-clawed feet to grip the tree supported by stiff tail feathers that brace their body during the process.

The nesting holes of woodpecker are well hidden and defended against small predators. Some woodpeckers build their nest on trees close to human habitations to lessen chances of predation by snakes and birds like owls or eagles. Rufous woodpecker lives in the neighborhood of tree ants. Some times it makes its home within the ant nests.

Male woodpeckers are brilliantly colored while the females are drab and colorless. The male Williamson’s Sapsucker woodpecker is so different from the female; they were once considered to be two different species altogether.

Communication of woodpeckers is called drumming. Woodpeckers hammer on dead trees or even rooftops with their chisel tipped beak. The male Great spotted woodpecker gives drumming bursts six to seven hundred times a day. This is his courtship song to attract a female. The communication is about finding a suitable site for nesting. A receptive female may hear his call and approach him. The male now begins to excavate a nest hole and will stop his song and go silent for several days.

Eggs of woodpeckers are white and incubated by both the male and the female. If both have to leave the nest hole, they make frequent visits to their nest to keep guard from predators or other woodpeckers.

Winter is a season for storing food in exclusive territories. The Redheaded woodpecker of Maryland stores large quantities of acorns in tree cavities. It defends the territory from rival woodpeckers between September and May. In the late May, the woodpecker abandons the area and moves away to a nesting site where it finds a suitable tree to drill a home and raise the chicks. Rarely does the woodpecker feeds its chicks with the acorns it had stored so seriously all through the winter.

Woodpeckers feed their young without rest. The Gila woodpecker picks up sunflower seeds from a seed feeder and takes the seeds to a hummingbird honey water feeder (kept in the backyards of human habitations). Here the seeds are soaked in the honey water mixture. The woodpecker carries these sweetened seeds to feed its young.

Woodpeckers are one of those bird species that have become reduced in their populations due to intensive woodcutting. The Ivorybilled woodpecker of North America became extinct in 1987, a recent example of human pampering of forest life.

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