Hairy Woodpecker Drumming and Knocking
This afternoon I heard a rapid drumming in the edge of the woods, and found a male Hairy Woodpecker drumming in what was left of a broken-off, standing dead pine. It was a mostly cloudy day, sweetly cooler after rainstorms moved through last night, washing away the very warm, humid weather of the past few days.
Erect posture, a long, rather stout, pointed bill, and intense, focused behavior are characteristics that can identify a Hairy Woodpecker – distinguishing it from the smaller Downy Woodpecker with very similar black and white plumage, white breast, black and white striped face, and a small patch of red on the back of the head of a male. Except for the drumming, this one was quiet. Often a Hairy Woodpecker is very vocal, calling out frequent, emphatic peenk! notes as it works.
This one drummed several times as I watched, on a bare section of the dead pine near the top, with pauses of 30 seconds or more in between. The drumming sounded fast and not deep, with an almost light quality – but maybe that has more to do with the tree than the woodpecker, I don’t know. In the pauses between drumming he preened, combing and digging his long pointed bill through his breast feathers and turning around to preen his back and wings. He scratched the left side of his head with one foot, then the right side of his head with the other foot. Then he drummed again.
After several minutes of this, he flew to a thin branch sticking out from a nearby white oak, and immediately began to knock vigorously on one spot on the branch. It was impressive to watch because he knocked hard, several times in a row, working steadily, using almost his whole body in the movement. Repeatedly, he leaned his head and neck far back and hurled it forward to strike the thin branch with the bill. Whack, whack, whack, whack. He paused a couple of times, but not often. I could see the hole in the bark and the pale splintered wood emerge – and then he seemed to find something, plunging the long bill into the cavity and pulling something out. Beetle? Grub? Whatever it was, he plunged the bill in three or four more times and seemed to be eating something. Then he flew to another oak nearby, wiped his bill on a branch, and knocked a few times there, but did not stay long before flying further away, into the woods.