Pileated Woodpecker

A Chisel With Feathers

The pileated woodpecker digs for dinner. Its bill is chisel-shaped, and it pries off long slivers of wood to open up the tunnels where ants live. In one study of coastal forests in Washington State, carpenter ants made up more than half of what these birds ate, with beetle larvae and termites filling in during the breeding season.

Built-in ant spear Its tongue is long, stretchy and pointed, with barbs and sticky saliva that snag ants out of their tunnels.

The holes it digs are big and rectangular, and they can be large enough to weaken a smaller tree or even snap it in half.

Crow-Sized, Zebra-Faced

This is the largest woodpecker found in most of North America, with a dull black body and a red crest. Its body runs 16 to 19 inches long and its wingspan is 26 to 30 inches. It weighs 8.8 to 12.3 ounces, and an average adult is about 364 grams. Filmed fleeing, pileated woodpeckers flap rapidly just after take-off, then settle into a more relaxed level flight.

Landlord of the Forest

Pileated woodpeckers live year-round in forests across southern Canada and the eastern, midwestern and western United States, from Nova Scotia south to Florida. They prefer to nest in moist areas close to streams. A nest hole is about 8 inches wide and 2 feet deep, and those excavations provide habitat for many other species. That makes it a possible keystone species, one whose work shapes a whole community.

It also announces itself. It usually drums on a dead, resonant tree, and the drumming is used to proclaim a territory. It drums most often in the morning, and more often in early spring as courtship begins. A study of 123 nests in northeastern Oregon found birds breeding at a year old, and some surviving to at least nine. The database AnAge lists a maximum recorded longevity of 13 years in the wild.

Logging in the 19th and 20th centuries cut pileated numbers in eastern North America. As many of those forests have grown back in recent decades, woodpecker species have grown in number with them.