Identification

Woodpecker Identification

Size is the mark everyone reaches for and the one that fails most often. Judge the bill against the depth of the bird's own head instead, and a lone woodpecker with nothing to compare becomes identifiable.

The most common woodpecker question in North America has one answer, and it is not the one people expect. Asked to separate a Downy from a Hairy Woodpecker, almost everybody reaches for size, and size is the mark that fails, because a bird alone on a tree gives you no yardstick. A Hairy 60 feet (18 m) up an oak looks small. A Downy 8 feet (2.4 m) from the window looks big.

The mark that works is a ratio, and a ratio is immune to distance, lens, lighting and wishful thinking: compare the length of the bill with the depth of the bird's own head, measured on the same bird at the same moment. That comparison, plus a look at the outer tail feathers if the bird spreads them, settles the pair for good.

This page starts there, then works out through the rest of the family: the naming disaster that is Red-bellied versus Red-headed, the two flicker forms and their hybrids, the Pileated, the small western species, the sapsuckers, and the two boreal specialists you will not get at a feeder. It ends with which species come to suet and which do not. If you are not sure the bird is a woodpecker at all, the identification hub sorts families first.

Why size fails and the bill works#

Downy and Hairy Woodpeckers share almost identical plumage: black crown, white eyebrow and cheek stripe, a broad white stripe down the center of the back, black wings heavily spotted white, white underparts, and on males a red patch on the nape. Nothing in that pattern separates them. The differences are all proportional, and the biggest one is the bill.

Look at the head in profile. Measure by eye the depth of the head, from the top of the crown straight down to the throat, at the point where the bill joins the face. Now compare the bill length with that depth.

• A Downy Woodpecker bill is markedly shorter than the head is deep, roughly a third to a half of it. It looks like a small chip stuck onto the face, almost too small for the bird.
• A Hairy Woodpecker bill is roughly as long as the head is deep. It looks like a serious chisel, long and heavy, and it changes the whole shape of the face.

Two backup marks help. The outer tail feathers are white in both species, but a Downy's carry black spots or bars while a Hairy's are plain white. You need the tail spread or a view from below, and when you get it the mark is decisive. Voice is the other: a Downy's common call is a soft, flat pik and its whinny descends in pitch, while a Hairy's call is a sharp, loud peek and its rattle stays level.

Downy and Hairy compared#

The foraging line is worth reading twice. A Downy is light enough to hang from a goldenrod gall or work up a dead weed stem, and a Hairy is not. If the bird is balancing on something no thicker than a pencil, you have a Downy without needing to look at the bill at all.

Red-bellied and Red-headed: the naming problem#

This is the single worst pair of names in North American birding, and it produces the same conversation every week. The Red-bellied Woodpecker has a red crown and nape and a faint peach wash on the belly that is genuinely hard to see. Its obvious features are the black-and-white barred back, sometimes described as a zebra back, and a plain pale gray-buff face and underparts. The male's red runs from the bill back over the crown to the nape; the female shows red on the nape and a red patch above the bill but a gray crown between them.

The Red-headed Woodpecker is a different-looking bird entirely. The adult has an entirely crimson head and throat, a solid unmarked black back, a clean white belly and huge white patches on the inner wing that show as white blocks at rest and as flashing white in flight. There is no barring anywhere. It is also far less common, is declining across much of its range, and prefers open woodland, oak savanna, burned areas and stands of dead trees.

Two practical notes. First, a Red-bellied with strong red on the crown in bright sun is what people are usually reporting as a Red-headed. Second, juvenile Red-headed Woodpeckers have a brown head through their first fall and winter, which produces a genuinely puzzling bird with the adult's black back and white wing patches but a plain brown head. That one is real, and it fools people every autumn.

Northern Flicker, yellow-shafted and red-shafted#

The Northern Flicker is a large brown woodpecker that spends much of its time on the ground eating ants, which is unlike anything else in the family. All forms show a brown back barred with black, a black crescent bib across the chest, heavy black spotting on a buff belly, and a bright white rump that flashes when the bird flies away from you. That white rump on a big brown bird bounding across a lawn is usually all you need.

The two meet in a broad hybrid zone through the Great Plains and the eastern Rockies, and the hybrids are not subtle: a bird with orange shafts, or a red moustache and a red nape crescent together, or a gray crown with a brown face. Those birds are real intergrades and should be logged as Northern Flicker rather than forced into one form. Yellow-shafted birds also stray west and red-shafted birds east in winter, so a single odd flicker outside the expected range is not automatically a hybrid.

Pileated, and what else gets called one#

The Pileated Woodpecker is crow-sized, roughly 16 to 19 inches (40 to 49 cm) long, black with a flaming red crest, white stripes down the neck and broad white underwings that show in flight. Nothing else in North America looks like it. The male has a red moustache stripe and red running forward to the bill; the female has a black moustache and a gray-brown forehead.

It is more often identified by its work than by sight. Pileateds cut large rectangular or oval excavations into dead trunks, several inches across, and leave big rectangular wood chips at the base of the tree. Round or ragged holes are other species. Rectangles with chunky chips are Pileated.

The birds most often misreported as Pileated are Red-headed Woodpeckers, because of the red head, and Northern Flickers, because of the size. The crest settles all of it.

The small western woodpeckers#

Three species cause most of the confusion west of the Rockies, and one of the three pairs genuinely overlaps.

• Ladder-backed Woodpecker: a small black-and-white desert species of the Southwest and Texas, with fine black-and-white barring covering the entire back and running well up toward the nape, a buffy face crossed by two black stripes, and on the male a red crown reaching forward over the forehead. It uses mesquite, desert scrub, cactus country and riparian edges.
• Nuttall's Woodpecker: nearly identical, restricted to California oak woodland and riparian corridors. The upper back is solidly black rather than barred, the face is whiter and more strongly striped, and the male's red is confined to the back of the crown. Where their ranges brush against each other in southern California the two hybridize occasionally, and those birds are not safely identified.
• Acorn Woodpecker: unmistakable once seen, with a clown-like face of black, white and red, a staring white eye, a red crown and a white rump and wing patch that flash in flight. It lives in family groups in oak country and drills granary trees riddled with thousands of acorn-sized holes.

For a small barred woodpecker in the Southwest, the rule of thumb is simple: barring all the way up the back and a red forehead points to Ladder-backed, a solid black upper back and red only at the rear of the crown points to Nuttall's, and range decides most cases before you get to plumage.

Sapsuckers, and the rows of holes#

Sapsuckers drill neat horizontal rows of shallow wells across a trunk or limb and return to drink the sap and eat the insects it traps. Those rows are the most reliable sapsucker sign in a yard, and they are what people are looking at when they think a tree is being killed. Healthy trees generally tolerate them.

Yellow-bellied Sapsucker is the eastern and boreal species and the only one regularly found east of the Great Plains. It has a red forehead, a long white stripe down the folded wing, a black-and-white striped face, a black chest shield and a pale yellow wash on the belly. The male has a red throat, the female a white one. Red-breasted Sapsucker replaces it along the Pacific coast and has an entirely red head and breast with no face pattern, and the sexes look alike. Red-naped Sapsucker occupies the Interior West between them, looking much like a Yellow-bellied but with a red patch on the nape and a red throat on both sexes.

All three are migratory in most of their range, and none of them behave like the woodpeckers people expect: they are quieter, more retiring, and often heard as an irregular stuttering drum rather than a steady one.

American Three-toed and Black-backed#

Two boreal and montane specialists round out the group, and both are birds you go looking for rather than birds that come to you. Both have three toes rather than four, both have a solid yellow crown patch on the male, and both specialize on beetle larvae in recently burned or beetle-killed conifer forest.

American Three-toed Woodpecker shows black-and-white barring or laddering down the center of the back. Black-backed Woodpecker has a solidly black back and blacker, glossier upperparts overall, with barred flanks and a cleaner white breast. Black-backed is on average larger and heavier-billed. Neither species comes to feeders in any meaningful way, and if a black-and-white woodpecker is on your suet in the Rockies it is almost certainly a Hairy.

Which woodpeckers come to suet#

Suet in a suet feeder is the food that brings this family in, with peanuts as a strong second. The response is not uniform though.

Beyond food, the thing that decides whether woodpeckers stay is dead wood. Every species here nests in a cavity it excavates itself, and most roost in cavities every night of the year, so a yard that removes every dead limb can feed woodpeckers and still hold none overnight. That trade-off is covered in snags and dead wood, and the wider setup in attracting woodpeckers.

The other family guides in this section are sparrow identification, finch identification and hummingbird identification.