Woodpecker 2

We can't say that some birds have a sweet tooth because birds don't have teeth. But some woodpeckers do like to visit the soda fountains of the woodpecker world, trees with sweet sap. They drill holes in the trunk and drink the sap that oozes out. There is one kind of woodpecker, the yellow bellied sapsucker, that makes this his main business.

He drills rows of squarish holes, about 1 inch across, around a tree. His tongue has a brushlike tip which helps him scoop up the sap and the juicy inner bark of the tree. Sometimes insects come to feast on the sap, and the bird eats them too. He may take a big insect, like a wasp, and beat it to a pulp. Then he dunks a billfull into the sap and works it into a ball before swallowing it. (Bird candy bar?) Sapsuckers eat several kinds of fruit, and even poison ivy berries!

When we think of storing up acorns we think of squirrels, but some woodpeckers do it too. Both the redheaded and acorn storing woodpeckers drill holes in the sides of trees and pack an acorn into each one. This provides food for the winter when insects are harder to find. One sycamore tree was studded with tightly packed acorns for a height of forty feet and a distance across of three feet. A giant pine tree had acorns embedded in it that were thought to number at least 50,000. Sometimes the acorns are hidden in hollow trees or other holes. There is a story of an acorn storing woodpecker who found a knothole in the wall of a cabin and spent all fall poking acorns into it. He put in several hundred but of course he couldn't get them back out.

The pileated (pie-lee-ateed) is our largest woodpecker, 19 inches from beak tip to tail tip. It's the only woodpecker with a crest on its head except the almost extinct ivory billed woodpecker.

You can always tell when a pileated woodpecker has been working on a tree. He makes large oblong or oval holes, instead of the round holes made by most woodpeckers. Sometimes the feeding holes are 6 or 7 inches across and nearly as deep. The birds peck first from one side and then the other, sometimes loosening a big splinter of wood and then prying it off with the beak. One combination chip and splinter was found that was 14 inches long.

The pileated woodpecker is a big help in our forests. It strips the bark off dead trees and eats the ants and grubs that are under it, as well as digging into the tree for those that have tunneled in. One of these birds was seen to strip 30 feet of bark off a dead tree in 15 minutes. They keep the carpenter ants from spreading from the dead trees to' the live trees and ruining them.

Even though pileated woodpeckers save many trees they have been known to hollow them out so deeply in making their nests, that the trunks collapsed. One man saw a tree break off just at the entrance to a nest hole. There were eggs in the nest at the time. In a few minutes he saw the mother bird fly to the nest, pick up an egg in her beak, and fly off. She made two more trips and got the other two eggs.

The downy woodpecker is the smallest of the woodpecker family (6 or 7 inches long) and the friendliest. It likes to be around people, and especially likes handouts of food in the winter time. A piece of suet tied to a tree is one of its favorite snacks.

Each of our useful birds has its own work to do, that helps people while the bird is making its living. The downy woodpecker cleans destructive caterpillars from twigs and out of cracks in the bark of trees.

If a downy woodpecker sees a hawk looking for him, he just waits on the opposite side of the tree trunk until his enemy is gone. Or if he is on a horizontal branch, he hides on the under side of it.

The three-toed woodpecker, that lives in Europe, has a good way to protect its eggs and young ones from animals that would like to eat them. It pecks its nest hole in a tree where a falcon has a nest. A falcon is a big bird of prey and other creatures will not risk coming near it. But the woodpecker is safe, because the falcon isn't interested in eating anything that small.

Insects are important to us in many ways. But if they were allowed to multiply unchecked, after a while any kind of life on this earth would be impossible. They would eat up the food supply needed by other creatures and then their own too. If we had to poison all the extra insects we would die from the poison also. But God knew our needs and gave us birds to keep the insects under control. Each bird has just the right equipment for its own special work.