Hairy Woodpecker

For Throwback Thursday, here's a Hairy Woodpecker I met a little over 5 years ago. This woodpecker is easy to confuse with its smaller but more common cousin, the Downy Woodpecker. A little like crows/ravens, you'd easily tell them apart if you saw them together; by weight the Hairys are over twice as big as the Downys. Fortunately while Hairys have approximately the size of beak you'd expect in a woodpecker, the Downys have a much shorter beak in proportion to the rest of their body. Most of the time I'm pretty confident in IDing these 2 birds if I get a good look.

Although they're both relatively small by our standards, their bigger size and longer beak made the Hairy more suitable for pecking at tough tree trunks while Downys smaller size is better for foraging on smaller branches. They've both adapted to slightly different ecological roles.

The Hairy Woodpecker also interacts with other woodpeckers in different ways:

  • They'll sometimes follow Pileated Woodpeckers, letting their much larger cousins do the heavy lifting of boring a hole into a tree. Then once the Pileated has moved on, the Hairy will move in and see if there was any food their big cousin missed.
  • They're also willing to drink sap from the holes in a tree made by their closer (in size and in taxonomy) cousins, the Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers. I suspect they could make similar holes themselves (and maybe they do on rare occasions). But it's possible that the sapsuckers have a better sense of how to get sap from a tree. And (like their following of the Pileated Woodpecker), why expend the energy to peck holes yourself if somebody else will do it for you?

April 29, 2018 at Lord Stirling Park
Photo 18259805, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)


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