Woodpecker Trivia
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50 free Woodpecker trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Woodpeckers hammer wood at forces around 1,000 g and walk away with a headache-free head. This quiz explains how: the spongy skull bone, the tiny brain with almost no fluid around it, the hyoid tongue bone that loops around the braincase like a seatbelt, and the nictitating membrane that snaps shut a millisecond before impact. It also covers the odd feet, the barbed sticky tongue that wraps around grubs rather than spearing them, and why species drum on your gutters. Beyond anatomy it visits the birds themselves: the crow-sized pileated woodpecker and its rectangular holes, the acorn woodpecker's communal granaries, the northern flicker that eats ants off the ground and is Alabama's state bird, the yellow-bellied sapsucker's sap wells, the red-cockaded woodpecker that only nests in living pines, the wryneck that twists its head like a snake, and the ivory-billed and imperial woodpeckers that may or may not still exist. Woody Woodpecker gets a few questions too, including who first supplied his laugh. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the woodpecker family and the individual species, and each question shows the sentence that supports it. Try our Birds quiz for the rest of the aviary.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Woodpeckers belong to which bird family?
Picidae
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.
Q 02Which inhabited continent has no native woodpeckers at all?
Australia
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.
Q 03Which explorer of the American West gives his name to a woodpecker first collected on his 1803-06 expedition?
Meriwether Lewis
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.
Q 04Which desert woodpecker is best known for digging its nest holes in giant saguaro cacti?
The Gila
The Gila. Its holes turn each saguaro into a desert apartment block: once the woodpecker moves out, owls, flycatchers, martins and kestrels move in.
Q 05The smallest woodpeckers of all belong to which group of mostly South American birds?
Piculets
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.
Q 06Which Southeast Asian bird is the largest woodpecker definitely still alive?
The great slaty
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.
Q 07Woodpeckers grip bark with two toes forward and two back, a layout they share with which popular cage birds?
Parrots
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.
Q 08Which of these woodpeckers has only three toes per foot?
Black-backed woodpecker
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.
Q 09Besides its feet, what does a woodpecker brace against the trunk to hold itself upright?
Its stiffened tail
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.
Q 10Which bone of a woodpecker is so long that it loops right over the top of the skull?
The hyoid (tongue) bone
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.
Q 11Which tiny birds tag along after sapsuckers to drink at the sap wells the woodpeckers drill?
Hummingbirds
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.
Q 12A 2022 study found that the woodpecker's skull, long admired as a shock absorber, really works as what?
A stiff hammer
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.
Q 13Which European woodpecker is nicknamed the yaffle, after its loud laughing call?
Q 21Woodpeckers eat the larvae of which tree-killing Asian beetle, identified in Michigan in 2002?
Emerald ash borer
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.
Q 22In a Roman legend, a woodpecker brought food to which children?
Romulus and Remus
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.
Q 23A rare woodpecker found nowhere else survives as a few hundred birds in the Yanbaru forest of which Japanese island?
Okinawa
Green woodpecker
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.
Q 14What closes over a woodpecker's eye in the millisecond before its beak hits the wood?
A nictitating membrane
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.
Q 15Roughly what deceleration does a woodpecker's head endure with each strike?
About 1,000 g
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.
Q 16Besides helmets, the woodpecker's head inspired a casing that protects what from extreme shocks?
Microelectronics
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.
Q 17A woodpecker's drum roll on a hollow trunk does the same job as which sound made by most other birds?
Song
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.
Q 18What colour are woodpecker eggs?
White
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.
Q 19In most woodpecker species, which parent takes the night shift incubating the eggs?
The male
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.
Q 20Northern flickers come in two forms, yellow-shafted in the east and which other in the west?
Red-shafted
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.
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.
Q 24The pileated woodpecker is famous for chipping holes of what shape into trees?
Roughly rectangular
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.
Q 25The pileated, North America's largest surviving woodpecker, is about the size of which familiar bird?
Crow
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.
Q 26The pileated woodpecker's favourite food is which insect?
Carpenter ants
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.
Q 27Which ivory-billed woodpecker nickname supposedly came from what people exclaimed on seeing it?
Lord God Bird
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.
Q 28The last undisputed US sighting of an ivory-billed woodpecker, in 1944, was in which state?
Louisiana
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.
Q 29A disputed 2004 ivory-billed woodpecker sighting triggered a huge Cornell search in which state?
Arkansas
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.
Q 30Besides the southern United States, the ivory-billed woodpecker lived on which Caribbean island?
Cuba
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.