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Red-headed woodpeckers provide summer entertainment

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Red-headed woodpeckers provide summer entertainment

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The red-headed’s sweet tooth is nothing new. During the 1700’s colonial era, the birds’ acute fondness for ripening fruit posed an eminent threat to domestic orchard crops. So much so, that enterprising gunners were paid cash bounties for woodpecker scalps. Although the practice would seem abhorrent today, human persecution appears to have had little effect. More than a half century later, wildlife artist John James Audubon marveled at the species’ unfathomable abundance. In 1840, Audubon noted that 100 red-headed woodpeckers where shot in one day from a single cherry tree.



Heading for home

A red-headed woodpecker digs out a nest.




More than any other woodpecker, red-headeds are aerially adept at catching insects on the fly. Unfortunately, their hunts often occur where traffic-injured insects concentrate alongside busy roadways, leading to the greatest vehicle mortality of any woodpecker species. During the 1950s and early ‘60s, it was not uncommon for vehicles to overheat when radiator grills became clogged with the combined carcasses of Monarch butterflies and road killed red-headed woodpeckers – a sobering reminder of both species’ former abundance in Iowa.

In contrast to many bird species, it is not uncommon for red-headed woodpeckers to produce two broods per season. The pair I observed this summer was no exception, with the second brood fledging on July 22. Until this summer, it had been several seasons since I’d seen juvenile, young-of-the-year red-headed woodpeckers in the woodlands I frequent. No surprise. Data collected during the North American Breeding Bird Surveys indicate that the number of red-headed woodpeckers has been on the wane, declining by an alarming 70 percent across much of its range – including Iowa – since 1966. In Iowa, red-headed woodpeckers suffered a disastrous 8 percent annual decrease from 1980 to 1994 — one of the most dramatic declines listed for any species. Although this alarming rate of decrease has slowed, redheaded woodpeckers will ultimately disappear from many Iowa habitats if current trends continue.

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