Pileated woodpeckers (Dryocopus pileatus) are the largest woodpecker in North America — nearly the size of a crow — with a black body, white facial stripes, and a red crest. Pileated comes from the Latin pileatus, meaning “capped,” a reference to the red crest that looks like a cap atop its head. If the bird seems familiar, it may be because of its resemblance to Universal Studio’s Woody Woodpecker cartoon character. Woody borrowed the pileated woodpecker’s red crest, loud call, and enthusiastic drumming. But real pileated woodpeckers do not have Woody’s blue feathers, yellow beak, or frenzied laugh.
These birds eat mostly ants and beetle larvae, which they find in decaying trees and rotten wood.
But they also eat fruits and berries, including poison ivy berries. Yes, this means that woodpeckers help spread poison ivy seeds in their droppings. Urushiol, the oily poison ivy chemical that causes a reaction in people, does not bother most birds. In fact, more than 60 bird species eat poison ivy berries, so the spread of this plant cannot be blamed on woodpeckers alone.
These woodpeckers do not migrate, but stay warm in winter by excavating overnight winter roosting shelters in rotting wood. These spaces protect them from wind and precipitation, helping them stay warm and minimizing calories spent. These holes are closer to the ground than the nesting cavities they build during the breeding season. A bird may use the same roosting hole all winter long. They survive by eating the ant and beetle larvae that lie dormant in trees throughout the winter. All a woodpecker has to do is find them and dig them out.
How do they find them? Scientists do not know exactly how pileated woodpeckers know where ants and larvae are hiding in trees. Naturalists from the 1800s seemed to think that woodpeckers could smell ants. Scientists today have shown that pileated woodpeckers can see ultraviolet wavelengths and may prefer UV-absorbing surfaces (like decayed pine) or UV-reflecting surfaces (like fungi) over surfaces that do neither.
The pileated woodpecker, like many other species, has seen its numbers go through dramatic changes. Two hundred years ago, pileated woodpecker populations declined due to the clearing of eastern forests for farmlands and merciless hunting. Even though most farmers and hunters over time came to realize that pileated woodpeckers did not harm crops and even though most people also agreed that woodpecker meat did not taste good, the bird was still hunted or captured.
In 1895, Major Bendire wrote:
I have occasionally seen bunches of these birds … for sale in the markets of Washington, D. C. … I tried to eat one … but I certainly cannot recommend it. It feeds to a great extent on the large black wood ants, which impart to it a very peculiar, and extremely unpleasant flavor, a kind of sweet-sour taste, which any amount of seasoning and cooking does not disguise.
I have seen pileated woodpeckers twice in recent years—both times with groups of noisy people. In both instances, the birds were not bothered by us, and kept up their pecking activities even though we were talking and snapping photos. But back when these woodpeckers were heavily hunted, they were much wearier it seems. In 1834, John James Audubon wrote:
When followed [it] always alights on the tallest branches or trunks of trees, removes to the side farthest off, from which it every moment peeps, as it watches your progress in silence; and so well does it seem to know the distance at which a shot can reach it, that it seldom permits so near an approach. Often when you think the next step will take you near enough to fire with certainty, the wary bird flies off before you can reach it… For miles have I chased it from one tree to another, without ever getting within shooting distance, until at last I was forced to resort to stratagem, and seeming to abandon the chase, took a circuitous route, concealed myself in its course, and waited until it came up, when, it being now on the side of the tree next to me, I had no difficulty in bringing it down.
This evasiveness is something that Audubon described his friend the Reverend John Bachman as also experiencing. Bachman—convinced pileated woodpeckers were cruel—captured some and attempted to raise them:
Their whole employment consisted in attempting to escape from their prison, regularly demolishing one every two days … They were at all times unsociable birds. On opening the door of my study one morning, one of them dashed off by me, and alighted on an apple-tree near the house… I walked into my study—the other was hammering at my books. They had broken one of the bars of the cage, and must have been at liberty for some hours, judging by the mischief they had done. Fatigued of my pets, I opened the door, and this last one hearing the voice of his brother, flew towards him and alighted on the same tree. They remained about half an hour … after which, they flew off… The ground was covered with snow, and I never more saw them.
Pileated woodpecker populations probably reached their lowest numbers in the late 1800s or early 1900s. By then, these once-abundant birds had become rare. In 1911, the U.S. Department of Agriculture published a bulletin about woodpeckers, mentioning the rarity of pileated woodpeckers: “Unfortunately the bird is so scarce in many places that it is an object of curiosity, and the man or boy with a gun never lets pass a chance to shoot one.”
Beginning in the twentieth century, abandoned farmlands reverted to forests, and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 banned the killing of woodpeckers (even though they are not migratory). The fact that they ate insect pests helped to save them, and pileated woodpecker populations began to increase.
The return of the pileated woodpecker, which people once thought might become extinct like the similar-looking ivory-billed woodpecker, is one of nature’s success stories. Today the pileated woodpecker population is stable, demonstrating that some bird populations can recover if humans just leave them alone.
A stronger
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