Bird Profile

Red-headed Woodpecker

An adult Red-headed Woodpecker has a head of solid crimson, a black back and huge white wing patches. It is unmistakable, it is genuinely scarce, and the reason is habitat rather than food.

The Red-headed Woodpecker (Melanerpes erythrocephalus) is a medium-small woodpecker, 7.5 to 9 inches (19 to 23 cm) long, built out of three blocks of color: a solid crimson head and neck, a black back and tail, and clean white underparts with a large white panel on each wing. There is no gradient anywhere on the bird, and the sexes look the same.

It is one of the easiest North American birds to name and one of the harder ones to find. Across much of its historic range it has thinned out to scattered local pairs, and most people who report one at a feeder are looking at a Red-bellied Woodpecker.

This profile covers how to be certain which bird you have, the habitat that decides whether you will ever see one, its unusual habits of catching insects in flight and hoarding food, and what is behind the long decline.

How to identify a Red-headed Woodpecker#

An adult has an entirely crimson hood: forehead, crown, face, chin and throat, ending in a sharp line across the upper chest. No pale cheek, no black mask, no gray.

The back, wings and tail are glossy black. Across the rear half of each wing runs a broad white patch, so obvious in flight that the bird looks black in front and white behind. Underparts are white with no streaking or spotting. The bill is stout and gray.

Males and females are identical in the field. Juveniles are the common source of confusion: through their first fall and into winter they have a dusky brown head, a brownish-black back, and dark bars crossing the white wing patches. The red comes in gradually, so a bird with a mottled brown and red head in late winter is a young bird finishing its transition.

The usual call is a loud, sharp tchur or queeah, harsher and higher than a Red-bellied's rolling churr. Drumming is short and even.

Telling it from a Red-bellied Woodpecker#

The other two black-and-white feeder woodpeckers, the Downy and the Hairy, have striped faces and a white stripe down the back, and never a full red head.

Where and when you will see one#

The habitat requirement is specific: open woodland with plenty of dead standing timber. That means oak savanna, burned or storm-damaged woods, beaver ponds with drowned trees, groves in pasture, river bottoms, orchards, golf courses, cemeteries and older parks with big scattered trees and open ground between them.

Closed forest is wrong for them, and so is a manicured suburb where every dead limb is cut within a month. The bird hunts by watching from an exposed perch and needs both the open flight space and the dead wood.

Movements are irregular. Northern birds shift south in fall in some years and not others, and those movements track the acorn and beechnut crop rather than the calendar. A neighborhood can hold birds all winter after a heavy mast year and none the next.

Food, flycatching and hoarding#

Red-headed Woodpeckers are the most insectivorous of the common woodpeckers and among the least reliant on drilling into wood. They catch beetles, grasshoppers, cicadas and moths in mid-air from a perch, in sallies that look more like a flycatcher than a woodpecker, and they also pick prey off the ground.

The rest of the diet is heavily vegetable: acorns, beechnuts, corn, wild fruit and berries, plus the occasional nestling or bird egg.

Caching is central to how they survive winter. Birds wedge acorns, beechnuts, kernels of corn and even live grasshoppers into crevices in bark, fence posts, siding and roof gaps, hammering them tight. They are the only North American woodpecker known to routinely cover stores with pieces of bark or wood, and they defend a stocked winter territory against other birds.

Feeding them where they occur#

If a pair holds territory nearby, they will use feeders, most readily from fall through winter.

• Suet in a cage or log, mounted on a trunk or pole. Cake types and warm-weather handling are in the suet guide, and cage designs in suet feeders.
• Cracked corn on an open surface, which suits their caching habit. See cracked corn for grades and spoilage cautions.
• Black oil sunflower and sunflower hearts, taken from a tray.
• Peanuts, whole or halved, from a mesh feeder or platform. Quality notes are in peanuts for birds.

An open platform feeder set in the open, rather than tucked against shrubs, matches how the bird approaches food. Expect the seed to leave faster than it is eaten, since much of it is going into storage.

Nesting and the competition for cavities#

Pairs excavate a cavity 8 to 80 feet (2.5 to 24 m) up, usually in a dead limb, a dead trunk or a utility pole, and frequently in wood so far gone that it would be condemned as unsafe by any tree service. Clutches run 4 to 5 white eggs, with two broods in the southern part of the range.

European Starlings compete directly for finished cavities and can evict a pair from a completed hole. Starlings are not the sole cause of the decline, but they take good sites in exactly the open habitat this woodpecker prefers. Feeder-level tactics are in keeping starlings off feeders, though the nest-site problem is harder to address.

The decline, honestly stated#

Long-running surveys have shown substantial, sustained declines in Red-headed Woodpeckers over the past half century, and the species is treated as a bird of conservation concern in many states. It was a familiar bird to previous generations across the Midwest and East, and it is not that now.

The likeliest causes stack up rather than compete:

• Loss of open wooded habitat, as savanna and pasture woodlots were cleared or grew into closed forest under fire suppression.
• Removal of dead trees and limbs from farms, parks and suburbs, which takes away nest sites and stores.
• Loss of mast, including the effective disappearance of the American chestnut and the reduction of old beech and oak stands.
• Cavity competition with starlings.
• Vehicle collisions, an unusual pressure that follows from a bird that hunts insects on the wing along roadsides.

There are local bright spots where oak savanna is being restored with fire and where dead timber is left standing after storms or beaver flooding, and birds return to those places fairly quickly.

What actually helps this species#

• Keep standing dead trees and dead limbs anywhere they threaten nothing.
• Keep the ground beneath open. Mown or grazed ground with scattered large trees is the structure they hunt in.
• Plant and protect oaks and beeches for mast. Native plants for birds covers choices by region.
• Offer suet and an open tray from October onward if birds are in the neighborhood, alongside the wider approach in how to attract woodpeckers.
• Report your sightings to a public database such as a nest-monitoring or feeder-watch project. For a scarce and patchy species, records from ordinary yards are how range changes get noticed.
• Do not expect to import one. As with other habitat specialists, the yard has to suit the bird first. The seasonal groundwork is in fall bird feeding.