Pileated Woodpecker

Pileated Woodpecker

by YankeeJim | May 24, 2011 at 03:35 pm

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My brother and I are inspired outdoorsmen. Our father wanted to be a Game Warden. When we were babies, he took a test and qualified for an assignment in Ohio. Instead, having been a Navy combat air crewman, he became an aeronautical engineer. However, we lived in a rural area and made regular visits to the woods as a family.

Dad taught us how to observe animals and nature. We learned to walk like Native Americans quietly through the woods.

I taught this to my daughter and I have reported before how we encountered a bear not 10 feet away. While that was a fright at first, we knew how to deal with the encounter by talking as if nothing was wrong and going about our business in the opposite direction from the bear. The bear didn’t mind.

This spring, I came into Great Falls National Park and saw at least six pileated woodpeckers and 10 downy woodpeckers. I could not believe it. They were concentrated in an area of fallen trees.

I didn’t have my camera and could not take pictures.

I told my brother how disappointed I was about not having pictures, so he sent to me a picture that he took last week. He is amazing at finding birds in the woods.

“The Pileated Woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus) is a very large North American woodpecker, almost crow sized, inhabiting deciduous forests in eastern North America, the Great Lakes, the boreal forests of Canada, and parts of the Pacific coast. It is also the largest woodpecker in America.

Adults (40 to 49 centimetres (16 to 19 in) long; 250 to 350 grams (8.8 to 12 oz) mass) are mainly black with a red crest and a white line down the sides of the throat. They show white on the wings in flight. Adult males have a red line from the bill to the throat, in adult females these are black. The only North American birds of similar plumage and size are the Ivory-billed Woodpecker of the Southeastern United States and Cuba, and the related Imperial Woodpecker ofMexico. However, unlike the Pileated, both of those species are extremely rare, if not extinct. Most reports of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker are believed to be erroneous reports of the far more common Pileated.[2]

The call is a wild laugh, similar to the Northern Flicker. Its drumming can be very loud, often sounding like someone striking a tree with a hammer. This bird favors mature forests, but has adapted to use second-growth stands and heavily wooded parks as well.”

I am lucky enough that I live in a part of a city where both mentioned woodpeckers, sap suckers, and numerous nuthatches are a regular part of my backyard. The Pileated Woodpeckers are amazing for the speed that they can reduce an old stump or log to nothing but "rubble".

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