Life histories of North American woodpeckersBent, Arthur Cleveland
Science
Life histories of North American woodpeckers
Bent, Arthur Cleveland
Birds -- North America; Woodpeckers -- North America
Audubon states that “it seldom comes near the ground”;
but the birds we have watched behave no differently from
pileated woodpeckers in this respect, sometimes working
high up in the trees but at other times within five or ten
feet of the ground. The female of the Florida pair which we
watched for over an hour on a “burn” sometimes got down on
the ground around the seared, prostrate trunks of the saw
palmettos, hopping like a Flicker, while her mate stayed on
the trunks of the pines five to ten feet up. We never saw
the Louisiana birds on the ground but there was plenty of
evidence, both in Florida and Louisiana, that a bird will
continue scaling the bark from recently killed trees for
the beetle larvae beneath, clear to the base of the tree,
until the tree stands absolutely naked with the bark piled
around its base.
Frequently they return again and again to the same tree
until they have entirely stripped it. At one time we
thought this was their chief method of feeding, but we have
since watched them digging for borers exactly like hairy
or pileated woodpeckers. At one time we watched the female
working at a deep gash in the tall stub of a dead gum,
which was apparently a favorite feeding place. She clung
to the spot for about five minutes, occasionally picking
hard, but never chipping off any large flakes that would
account for the depth of the hole which was exactly like
that made by pileated woodpeckers,--about four inches deep
and eighteen inches long. Finally she flew and disappeared
in the direction of the nest which was about two hundred
yards away. In a few minutes the male ivorybill came to the
same spot where the female had been working and he, too,
picked at the hole and stayed there for several minutes. At
the time we decided that either the ivorybills or perhaps
the pileateds had made the gash in the tree for carpenter
ants and that the ivorybills were returning each time for
more ants. Since the stub was rather rotten and full of
woodpecker drillings, we decided to cut it down the next
day and make certain of what the ivorybills were securing.
Upon examining the hole made by the birds there was,
however, no evidence of carpenter ants, and the deep gash
followed the tunnels of large, wood-boring beetle larvae
(Cerambycidae) of which there were a great many in the
tree; the only other available woodpecker food was termites
of which there were comparatively few.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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