The Flamboyant Pileated Woodpecker

Behold, a big dashing bird the size of a crow with a flaming crest and a silly, loud, laughing call.

The pileated woodpecker is classified as arboreal, meaning it has feet with two toes, each facing forward and backward with a specialized arrangement of opposite muscles and tendons. This gives them a vise-like clasping grip on a tree trunk while stiff tail feathers serve as supporting props while they climb.

Like most woodpecker species, distinctive patches of red are more pronounced in pileated males. The bone in their skull is thicker to withstand the frequent thunderous pounding with a chisel-like bill to find insects and larvae, particularly carpenter ants. Their long tongues have barbed tips to retrieve their prey, and they have feathers over their nostrils to protect the nasal cavity from dust raised by their excavations.

While probing and digging out the rotting punky wood of a dead tree festered with insects, the daily intensive effort to find food also serves an industrial benefit of carving out the inner cavity of a hollow, perfect for nesting, hatching, and raising a brood of fledglings, usually 20 or 30 feet off the ground for protection from climbing predators.

Both parents take alternating turns in caring for the fledglings, as well as bringing food by regurgitating it into their mouths, as illustrated in my drawing.

This colorful species that is a delight to most birdwatchers became rare in Eastern America with the clearing of forests in years past, but has increased in numbers again since the beginning of the 20th century.

The graphic performance of this high profile figure in parks, backyard woodlots, and even suburbs of large cities, inspired by the similar acorn woodpecker, became a perfect animated anthropomorphic of the pileated as a screwball characterization of inane behavior feathered in garish design by Universal Pictures. Woody Woodpecker starred along with Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck in the year 1940, and Woody’s prolific voice and behavior was successfully imitated by the famous Mel Blanc, and his famous laugh was subsequently trademarked.

However, Woody’s humorous character gradually evolved into a more refined and logical hero portrayal later around 1972. This improved image was produced for the Saturday morning television series The New Woody Woodpecker Show.

So, if a pair has moved into the backyard of your neighborhood to occupy a vacant apartment of their own making, you would have been the first to know about it. As a birdwatcher, you should be as royally entertained as you might have been as a child being taken to the Saturday afternoon cartoons. And if all their commotion as portrayed were to become dubious Hollywood performers, there is nothing to worry about except, of course, if they came for carpenter ants in one of the buildings. Trusting my characterization has appealed to readers of all ages.

By George B. Emmons

 

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