The Pileated Woodpecker is one of the most high-profile birds on the North American continent. It is nearly as big as a crow in color, black with bold, white stripes down its neck. It is named pileated because the dictionary derives from the term “pileated,” meaning capped top of its head covered with a flaming red crest.
With a razor-sharp beak carving a nesting hole in the hollow trunk of a dead tree, it drums a loud, startling tattoo into the air while laughing with a whinny sound that is unforgettable.
As in my illustration, the Woodpecker tail is held tightly against the trunk of the tree for a better grip on the bark of the limb, while the hole is drilled to find and eat ants. The Woodpecker makes good use of its tongue to extract live insects out of deadwood. My drawing shows both parents with freshly caught insects in their bills to feed them by regurgitation for about a month until they can supplement their own diet with fruits and nuts and wood-boring beetle larvae that comes into season.
In recent decades, the population of Pileated Woodpeckers has increased greatly to about 2,600,000 over most of the northern continent. This is when their former farmlands grew into more mature habitat, and the complete territory suddenly came alive with renewed drumming and laughing, loud enough to be witnessed and appreciated by bird lovers’ enjoyment and awareness that a modern miracle in the dead woodlands was coming about.
With much else going wrong in nature with global warming and climate change disrupting many years of avian seasonal migration, the Woodpeckers’ recent success record is suddenly giving hope to the increased future of our wildlife and wild birds.
The good news is getting even better because this habitat is becoming classified as a “keystone environment,” and their industrial drumming, laughing and drilling is providing no less than 38 additional species of animals, birds and other wildlife to be used as chambers for future living quarters.
By George B. Emmons
We gave a pair at our house in Tennessee.