Woodpeckers: A Closer Look at these Colorful Birds

Holiday Bird Bonanza!

Continuing our holiday theme, I’m featuring two birds with bright red features that remind us of the season’s colors. Meet the Downy Woodpecker and the Red-Bellied Woodpecker. While a challenge to see when perched on a tree, once their vibrant colors are visible, you will become transfixed by their beauty.

Their presence in my backyard is random, so I feel lucky to capture these photos. Be sure to read and discover more about these remarkable birds.

The Downy Woodpecker – Did You Know:

The active little Downy Woodpecker is a familiar sight at backyard feeders and in parks and woodlots, where it joins flocks of chickadees and nuthatches, barely outsizing them. An often acrobatic forager, this black-and-white woodpecker is at home on tiny branches or balancing on slender plant galls, sycamore seed balls, and suet feeders.

In winter Downy Woodpeckers are frequent members of mixed species flocks. Advantages of flocking include having to spend less time watching out for predators and better luck finding food from having other birds around.
Woodpeckers don’t sing songs, but they drum loudly against pieces of wood or metal to achieve the same effect. People sometimes think this drumming is part of the birds’ feeding habits, but it isn’t. In fact, feeding birds make surprisingly little noise even when they’re digging vigorously into wood.
The oldest known Downy Woodpecker was a male and at least 11 years, 11 months old when he was recaptured and rereleased in 1996 during banding operations in California. He had been banded in the same state in 1985.

The Red-Bellied Woodpecker – Did You Know:

Red-bellied Woodpeckers are pale, medium-sized woodpeckers common in forests of the East. Their strikingly barred backs and gleaming red caps make them an unforgettable sight – just resist the temptation to call them Red-headed Woodpeckers, a somewhat rarer species that’s mostly black on the back with big white wing patches. Learn the Red-bellied’s rolling call and you’ll notice these birds everywhere.

A Red-bellied Woodpecker can stick out its tongue nearly 2 inches past the end of its beak. The tip is barbed and the bird’s spit is sticky, making it easier to snatch prey from deep crevices. Males have longer, wider-tipped tongues than females, possibly allowing a breeding pair to forage in slightly different places on their territory and maximize their use of available food.
You may sometimes see Red-bellied Woodpeckers wedge large nuts into bark crevices, then whack them into manageable pieces using their beaks. They also use cracks in trees and fence posts to store food for later in the year, a habit it shares with other woodpeckers in its genus.