The World of the Redheaded Woodpecker

Since you all have gotten an idea now of what bird I am describing, now I am going to tell you a little bit about how the Red Headed Woodpecker interacts with its environment, where it lives, what it eats, how it mates, and what its habitat is like.

 Let's first talk about the habitat of the woodpecker. The Red-Headed Woodpecker breeds in deciduous woodlands, especially breech or oak, river bottoms, open woods, groves of dead and dying trees, orchards, parks, open country with scattered trees, forest edges, and open wooded swamps with dead trees and stumps. The deciduous woodlands include trees or shrubs that lose their leaves seasonally. These leaves form a carpet on the ground beneath the trees and eventually rot down to form a type of natural compost full of nutrients. The soils of the deciduous woodlands and forests include the brown earth. These soils are reasonably fertile with mildly acidic soil.

There are two types of deciduous forests/woodlands: Temperate deciduous forest and Tropical and subtropical deciduous forest. The Temperate Deciduous Forest have plant communities distributed in North and South America, Asia, and Europe. They have formed under climatic conditions which have great seasonable temperature variability with growth occurring during warm summers and leaf drop in autumn and dormancy during cold winters. The Tropical and Subtropical Deciduous Forest is developed to seasonal rainfall patterns. Sometimes, there is quite a drought and the rainfall effects the growth of the plants.

Most Redheaded Woodpeckers are omnivorous. This means they eat a mixture of both plants and animals. They mostly eat beech and oak mast, seeds, nuts, berries, fruit, insects, bird eggs, nestlings and mice. Two-thirds of the bird's diet are plants however. In order to hunt their food, they are flycatchers. They fly to catch insects in the air or on the ground, forage on trees or gather and store nuts. The Red-Headed Woodpecker is one of only four woodpeckers known to store food with wood or bark. They are also known to remove the eggs of other species from nests and even enter duck-nesting boxes and puncture duck eggs. They do not really have predators, but the can fall victim to certain things. They can fall victim to cats, Cooper's or sharp-shinned hawks, raccoons that may raid the nest, or snakes.

When nesting, they nest in a cavity in a dead tree, utility pole, or a dead part of a tree that is between 8 and 80 feet above the ground. They also nest in fence posts, open sheds, bird houses, and old wagon wheels.  Females lay 4 to 7 eggs in early May which are incubated for two weeks. Both sexes participate in the incubation period. The male starts to drill another hole as it gets ready to raise the next brood while the young from the first brood are still being raised by the female. They are monogamous, staying true to their chosen mate for the entire breeding season.

The Red-Headed Woodpecker is a vulnerable species in Canada and is a threatened species in some states in the United States. These States include all of the Inland South Region: Virginia, West Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, Arkansas, southern Missouri, Northern Louisiana, eastern Oklahoma, and East Texas. The species has declined in numbers due to habitat loss caused by harvesting of snags, a decline in farming resulting to regeneration of eastern forests, monoculture crops, the loss of small orchards, and treatment of telephone poles with creosote.