Caption: Male downy woodpecker on Governors Island, New York City, December 16, 2016
The Downy Woodpecker
By Matt Civello
Tap, tap, tap. Methodical, deliberate and thorough, with distinct pauses between each tap. Tap, tap, tap, tap. The sound of a small sharp beak meeting bark, the signature sound of a downy woodpecker (Picoides pubescens) doing what downy woodpeckers do, tapping along the bark of a deciduous tree searching for, extracting and eating insects from burrows in tree trunks, branches and fallen logs.
Slightly larger than a chickadee, with a beak shorter or as long as it head, and with the males sporting a telltale red spot on their heads, this member of the woodpecker family is a resident of the woodland and suburban areas across the entire span of North America. It is an important participant in the animal cycle.
The downy, and all members of the woodpecker family, play an important role both in protecting trees and aiding in the decomposition of dead and dying trees. They protect trees by scouring their trunks, bark and branches for potentially harmful insects and insect larvae. They aid in decomposition by breaking apart dead woody fibers with their beaks while searching for food and building nesting sites within the arboreal environs provided by trees nearing the end of their life cycle.
Downy woodpeckers are among the smallest woodpeckers in North America. They possess mad tree-clinging skills and are capable of gravity-defying feats of feeding and pecking upside down, sideways and every angle in between, on trees, logs, barns, roofs and any other wood structure within which insects have found harbor. These skills, combined with their small size, allow these diminutive insectavores opportunity to exploit feeding sites not accessible to larger members of the woodpecker family. Indeed, they have even been observed clinging to the stalks of goldenrod “hammering away at a plant gall to get at the larvae.”
There is in North America a veritable army of downy woodpeckers searching out insects. According to Partners in Flight, the downy woodpecker’s global breeding population is 14 million birds. Most of that population (79 percent) is found in the United States, and at least one of the 11 million estimated to be in the US at any one time was on Governors Island on Friday, December 16, 2016. The remaining numbers, approximately 3 million, are to be found in Canada.
In the early spring and summer, you are likely to hear the downy’s mating and territorial calls, which are not really calls or vocalizations at all. Instead, the downy (both male and female) signals to potential mates, and warns territorial rivals, by loudly pecking out different signature drumbeats on acoustically appropriate tree limbs. The sound pattern is distinctly different from the sound created by a foraging member of this species.
In the case of our example, the male downy woodpecker was working his way along the ridge of damaged but long-healed bark on a young tree growing near the tool-wall in the NYC Compost Project hosted by Earth Matter’s Compost Learning Center on Governor’s Island. He had followed along with a flock of chickadees and titmice that were in the branches above, a practice that makes finding food more likely as well as providing cover from potential predators. As for the young tree he was observed pecking away at, it likely has many years ahead of it. During those years, the decedents of the diminutive but effective little protector that works along this tree’s trunk will have opportunity to find nesting in a hollow within it, and yet another generation of our bird’s descendants will find grubs and beetle larva in this tree’s fallen trunk.