There’s no one pattern seen in all woodpeckers. Despite these general patterns, there’s plenty of color variation across this diverse bird family. And quite a few species have greenish wings. Many woodpecker species have bold black-and-white coloration, on just the head or over most of the body. Most of them create their nests by chipping out a deep hole in wood. Drumming is one of their unique features. They communicate with each other by drumming against wood to make a loud sound. Stiff tail feathers and strong feet allow a woodpecker to brace itself against a tree while whacking at the wood.īesides digging for insects to eat, woodpeckers also use their bills for communication and for excavating their nests. These movements often look herky-jerky.Īnd when woodpeckers fly, many of them have a bounding or undulating flight path, where they rise a little as they flap their wings and fall a little between bursts of flapping.ĭowny Woodpecker ( Dryobates pubescens). They tend to hitch themselves up tree trunks while in an upright posture. The posture and movements of woodpeckers are distinct. A long, thin tongue helps them snatch bugs out of little crevices and tunnels they expose in rotting wood. What they’re looking for beneath the surface are insects to eat. This is a finely-honed tool for excavating wood. Woodpeckers have a straight, chisel-shaped bill. I imagine that in most languages the name for these birds captures the wood-destroying aspect of their behavior. In Spanish, a woodpecker is called a pájaro carpintero-a carpenter bird. The first feature is the fact that, well, woodpeckers peck wood. Let’s quickly go over these features now and then I’ll get into more detail on some of them later. Several outstanding features make woodpeckers so easy to tell apart from other birds.
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