50 Fun Facts About Woodpecker

Woodpeckers belong to which bird family?

Picidae. Nuthatches (Sittidae) and treecreepers (Certhiidae) work their way over trunks in much the same manner, but both are songbirds and no relation of the woodpeckers at all.

Which inhabited continent has no native woodpeckers at all?

Australia. Woodpeckers never reached New Guinea or Madagascar either, and mammals took the vacant job: Madagascar's aye-aye and Australia's striped possum both find grubs by tapping on wood.

Which explorer of the American West gives his name to a woodpecker first collected on his 1803-06 expedition?

Meriwether Lewis. Lewis's woodpecker hardly behaves like one: it swoops out from a perch to catch insects in mid-air like a flycatcher, and his partner Clark got a nutcracker instead.

Which desert woodpecker is best known for digging its nest holes in giant saguaro cacti?

The Gila. Its holes turn each saguaro into a desert apartment block: once the woodpecker moves out, owls, flycatchers, martins and kestrels move in.

The smallest woodpeckers of all belong to which group of mostly South American birds?

Piculets. They forage out on the thinnest twigs and bamboo stems, pecking at them for insects just as their big relatives work over whole trunks.

Which Southeast Asian bird is the largest woodpecker definitely still alive?

The great slaty. It holds the title by default, since the still bigger imperial and ivory-billed woodpeckers are probably gone, and it is itself now listed as vulnerable as its old forests are logged.

Woodpeckers grip bark with two toes forward and two back, a layout they share with which popular cage birds?

Parrots. The layout is called zygodactyl and works like a clamp: it lets a woodpecker hang on a vertical trunk and a parrot grip a branch with one foot while holding food in the other.

Which of these woodpeckers has only three toes per foot?

Black-backed woodpecker. It is also a fire-follower: when a blaze kills a stand of conifers it soon moves in to dig the grubs of wood-boring beetles out of the dead trunks.

Besides its feet, what does a woodpecker brace against the trunk to hold itself upright?

Its stiffened tail. Feet and tail together make a tripod on vertical bark; wrynecks, which have ordinary soft tails, usually perch across a branch like any songbird instead.

Which bone of a woodpecker is so long that it loops right over the top of the skull?

The hyoid (tongue) bone. It splits in two, passes either side of the spine, runs up over the braincase and ends in the right nostril, which is how so long a tongue fits inside so small a head.

Which tiny birds tag along after sapsuckers to drink at the sap wells the woodpeckers drill?

Hummingbirds. In early spring, before many flowers have opened, the oozing wells keep ruby-throated hummingbirds fed, and the birds even build their nests close to a working sapsucker.

A 2022 study found that the woodpecker's skull, long admired as a shock absorber, really works as what?

A stiff hammer. Measurements on three species showed the head hardly cushions the blow, since soaking up the shock would only waste pecking power; the brain is simply small enough to stay below concussion level.

Which European woodpecker is nicknamed the yaffle, after its loud laughing call?

Green woodpecker. It seldom drums, relying on that ringing laugh instead; the call earned it other folk names such as rain-bird, and Professor Yaffle, the wooden bookend in Bagpuss, was modelled on it.

What closes over a woodpecker's eye in the millisecond before its beak hits the wood?

A nictitating membrane. This thickened inner eyelid keeps out flying chips and is thought to work like a seat belt as well, holding the eyeball in its socket at the moment of impact.

Roughly what deceleration does a woodpecker's head endure with each strike?

About 1,000 g. A woodpecker can take that up to 20 times a second because its brain is small and packed tightly into the skull, with almost no fluid around it to slosh about.

Besides helmets, the woodpecker's head inspired a casing that protects what from extreme shocks?

Microelectronics. Engineers copied the bird's skull and spongy bone with metal shells, a rubbery layer and tightly packed glass beads, and when the package was fired from an air gun almost every device inside kept working.

A woodpecker's drum roll on a hollow trunk does the same job as which sound made by most other birds?

Song. Drumming claims a territory and calls a mate, each species beating its own rhythm, and it is run by forebrain regions that closely match the ones songbirds use to learn their tunes.

What colour are woodpecker eggs?

White. Eggs laid at the bottom of a dark hole need no camouflage, and a pale shell is easier for the parents to make out in the gloom.

In most woodpecker species, which parent takes the night shift incubating the eggs?

The male. He also does most of the digging, so the bird that carved the hole is the one that sleeps in it on the eggs, while the pair take turns through the day.

Northern flickers come in two forms, yellow-shafted in the east and which other in the west?

Red-shafted. The two forms, named for the colour that flashes under the wings, were long counted as separate species, but on the Great Plains they interbreed so freely that a broad belt of birds comes out somewhere in between.

Woodpeckers eat the larvae of which tree-killing Asian beetle, identified in Michigan in 2002?

Emerald ash borer. It has killed millions of ash trees; in field trials, trunks caged against woodpeckers kept far more of their larvae, yet the birds alone do not seem able to hold the beetle back.

In a Roman legend, a woodpecker brought food to which children?

Romulus and Remus. In Plutarch's telling a she-wolf nursed the twins while a woodpecker fed and watched over them, both creatures being sacred to Mars, the god said to be their father.

A rare woodpecker found nowhere else survives as a few hundred birds in the Yanbaru forest of which Japanese island?

Okinawa. The Okinawa woodpecker lives nowhere else on Earth, and its patch of old forest has been hemmed in by logging, dams, golf courses and military building.

The pileated woodpecker is famous for chipping holes of what shape into trees?

Roughly rectangular. The bird gouges deep into rotten trunks, stumps and fallen logs after the insects inside, and the big slots it leaves are a sure sign a pileated is about.

The pileated, North America's largest surviving woodpecker, is about the size of which familiar bird?

Crow. The pileated grew rare when the eastern forests were felled, but as the woods grew back during the twentieth century the big woodpecker returned with them.

The pileated woodpecker's favourite food is which insect?

Carpenter ants. They make up the bulk of its diet, and the bird follows their galleries deep into rotten wood, then laps the colony up with a long, sticky tongue.

Which ivory-billed woodpecker nickname supposedly came from what people exclaimed on seeing it?

Lord God Bird. 'Lord God, what a bird!' is what startled onlookers are said to have cried, for it was the biggest woodpecker in the United States, with a pale bill like polished ivory.

The last undisputed US sighting of an ivory-billed woodpecker, in 1944, was in which state?

Louisiana. The artist Don Eckelberry saw it on the Singer tract, an old forest owned by the sewing machine company, where the felling was almost finished after an offer to buy the rights and save the trees was refused.

A disputed 2004 ivory-billed woodpecker sighting triggered a huge Cornell search in which state?

Arkansas. The search of the Cache River swamps yielded sound recordings and four seconds of blurry video; the Fish and Wildlife Service accepted the film as an ivory-bill, while many birders were never convinced.

Besides the southern United States, the ivory-billed woodpecker lived on which Caribbean island?

Cuba. The last sighting accepted by everyone came there in 1987, more than forty years after the last on the mainland, which is why some still hope a few birds hang on in the island's forests.

If it still exists, the world's largest woodpecker is endemic to which country?

Mexico. The imperial woodpecker of the Sierra Madre pine forests was last confirmed in 1956, the year it was caught on film; the felling of its old-growth pines, together with hunting, is thought to have finished it off.

Most woodpeckers never migrate, but the yellow-bellied sapsucker flies south each autumn, some as far as where?

Central America. Its summer and winter ranges barely overlap, so almost every bird makes the trip, and the females tend to fly farther south than the males.

Acorn woodpeckers store acorns in trees riddled with holes; what are these trees called?

Granaries. The birds drill each hole to fit one acorn, stock the tree every autumn and eat from it through the winter, and a good granary stays in use for generations.

Where do an acorn woodpecker group's females lay their eggs?

One shared nest. The breeding females all lay in the same hole, but each usually destroys any eggs already there before she starts laying herself, and the eggs stop vanishing only once all of them have begun.

The 'pileated' in pileated woodpecker refers to which of the bird's features?

Its red crest. Linnaeus named the bird pileatus in 1758, Latin for 'capped', working from an English naturalist who had simply called it the larger red-crested woodpecker.

Which is the smallest of North America's woodpeckers?

Downy woodpecker. It looks like a scaled-down hairy woodpecker, yet the two are not close relatives: the matching plumage evolved separately, and such look-alike pairs may be a form of mimicry.

Where does the northern flicker usually look for its food, unlike most other woodpeckers?

On the ground. It hops over lawns and fields and hammers at the soil the way its relatives hammer at wood, which is why it shuns dense forest and needs open country close by.

The northern flicker, nicknamed the yellowhammer, is the state bird of which US state?

Alabama. It is known as the Yellowhammer State, a nickname said to date from the Civil War, when its Confederate soldiers were dubbed yellowhammers after the bird.

Flickers rub insects through their feathers, perhaps to dose parasites with which acid the insects squirt?

Formic acid. The habit is called anting, and no one is sure what it is for: the acid may deter mites and lice, or the rubbing may simply wipe a foul-tasting spray off the prey before the bird swallows it.

The great spotted woodpecker began nesting in the 2000s on which island, long known for having no woodpeckers at all?

Ireland. Bird guides used to state flatly that Ireland had no woodpeckers; the first proven nest was found in County Down in 2007, and DNA shows the settlers came from Britain, not Scandinavia.

In Roman myth, which sorceress turned King Picus into a woodpecker when he spurned her?

Circe. In the best-known telling he refused her out of love for his wife, the nymph Canens; in another it is the gods who change the good king into the bird at the end of his reign.

The red-cockaded woodpecker of the American South digs its nest cavities in what, unlike most of its relatives?

Living pine trees. It picks old pines softened inside by a heart fungus and drills small wells around the entrance, so that sticky resin runs down the bark and keeps climbing predators out.

When cornered at its nest, the wryneck, a small relative of the woodpeckers, twists and sways its neck to imitate what?

A snake. It hisses as well, and the wryneck was once used in witchcraft and divination, which is perhaps how its old name, jynx, gave English the word jinx.

Which invasive bird competes with the red-headed woodpecker for nest cavities and is blamed in part for its decline?

European starling. It needs a hole to nest in but cannot dig one, so it moves into the woodpeckers' cavities; the felling of dead trees, which leaves fewer places to dig, has hurt the red-headed woodpecker too.

Who was the first voice of Woody Woodpecker, in the character's 1940 debut?

Mel Blanc. He left after a handful of cartoons for an exclusive Warner Bros. contract, where he was already Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, yet his recorded laugh went on being used in the Woody shorts for years afterwards.

Woody Woodpecker made his debut in November 1940 in a short starring which other Walter Lantz character?

Andy Panda. In Knock Knock the woodpecker pecks at the pandas' roof and takes over the film, and Lantz soon made the newcomer the star of his own cartoons.

Woody Woodpecker has long been the mascot of which Hollywood studio?

Universal. His manic laugh carried a novelty record named after him into the charts as one of the big hits of 1948 and on to an Oscar nomination, which it lost to Buttons and Bows.

Which colourful tropical birds are among the woodpeckers' closest relatives, classed with them in the same order?

Toucans. Barbets and honeyguides sit in the same order as well, and the family tie is a practical one: toucans often raise their chicks in holes that woodpeckers dug.

The wryneck returns each spring at about the same time as which bird, earning the old country name of its 'mate'?

The cuckoo. Country people called the wryneck the cuckoo's mate and took its ringing call as a sign that spring had arrived, the very thing the cuckoo itself is famous for announcing.

Which bird painter hailed the ivory-bill as the 'great chieftain of the woodpecker tribe'?

John James Audubon. He was struck by the bird's regal look and wrote that its bold plumage always reminded him of the colouring of the great Van Dyck.