Years ago, the first stop for us on the Christmas Bird Count was at Glenn and Elsie Reed’s farm on County Road 20. They fed birds from an enormous column feeder crafted to resemble a traffic light. In those years in which Glenn got his deer, he also hung the ribcage in an adjacent tree which was immensely popular with the chickadees, nuthatches and woodpeckers swarming his feeders.
As one interested in birds, and outdoors most days because of farming, Glenn kept tabs on the local birds and he told me that Red-headed Woodpeckers were the most common woodpeckers in Chisago County in the 1940s. It disturbed him how quickly they became scarce.
Red-headed Woodpeckers—not to be confused with Red-Bellied Woodpeckers, which also have a red head—are visually striking, with a brilliant crimson head and a bold black and white wing pattern. They are good-sized, about the dimensions of a Hairy, noisy and conspicuous during the breeding season, issuing a raucous “queer, queer, queer” that resembles the call of a Red-bellied Woodpecker. They range throughout Minnesota, except for the northeastern corner. Roberts noted in 1932, however, that they were most common in areas that had long been settled and were under cultivation. There, they occurred in savannah-like woodlots, oak savannah remnants, and golf courses with oak trees. Acorns make up a good share of their diet in Minnesota, but they also eat large beetles, a variety of fruit, such as apples and grapes—Roberts observes that they have a penchant for berries and can make a dent in the yield of cultivated patches of blueberries, raspberries and strawberries. They are also bee-eaters, and because of their size, a single bird can consume a lot of bees. Roberts mentions that in the spring, when other food is scarce, red-headed woodpeckers might focus on honey bees and had been known to ruin a hive by consuming the queen on its nuptial flight.
Red-headed Woodpeckers have the unusual (for a woodpecker) habit of catching flying insects on the wing. From a conspicuous perch, they will sally out like a kingbird, snap up an insect and return to their branch. They also make a practice of caching excess seed, shoving tidbits into cracks and crevices of trees and telephone poles, under bark, and beneath roof shingles. They will come to feeders, especially in winter, and especially those that offer suet.
The woodpeckers are cavity nesters, laying four to seven white eggs in a cavity excavated themselves. For this reason, dead and dying trees play an important role in their ecology. Dutch elm disease and the chestnut blight were a boon to these birds.
Red-headed Woodpeckers’ severe decline has been attributed to habitat loss and to changes in their food supply—the standard reasons. Roberts’ The Birds of Minnesota observes this additional cause: the birds frequented roadsides, perching on fence posts and telephone poles, criss-crossing highways and being struck and killed in “immense numbers.” This was a salient fact to Roberts, who could contrast it with a time when only horse and wagons traveled on roads. In 1932, he thought that this mortality was already causing a decline in numbers.
Roberts wrote at a time when Red-headed Woodpeckers were common and Eastern Bluebirds were scarcer, and he deplored the habit of woodpeckers aggressively commandeering a tree cavity, pecking holes in bluebird eggs and killing nestlings. Now the tables are turned. We should be so lucky if a woodpecker outcompeted a bluebird for a nest site.
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