When I was eight years old, my family and I took a trip to the Olympic Peninsula. We spent a week camping along that rugged coastline, falling asleep to the crash of waves beneath gale twisted trees. Of that trip, I remember very little. Only one thing stands out clearly. It was here I met the Pileated Woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus). At the base of a gnarled Western hemlock, I found a passion for birds that still burns deep.

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I used to have a hard time explaining why I liked woodpeckers so much. They’re no powerful birds of prey, nor are they elegant hummingbirds. Yet, woodpeckers play an integral role in forest ecosystems, even in the smaller patches we have on the Hill. They are built for a vertical world where their homes and food come from trees.

Because woodpeckers carve out their nests and roosts, as well as search for food in decaying wood, they end up providing space for other species along the way. This is most prominent when a woodpecker moves out of an old cavity, freeing up a space for a less picky occupant. Chickadees, swallows, owls, and squirrels are just a few of the characters that might move in afterwards. In the United States, 85 species of birds use tree cavities for nesting, only a few that aren’t woodpeckers are capable of creating their own. With 23 species of woodpeckers in the States, it should be obvious other birds rely on them (and this isn’t even counting a host of mammals that do as well).

Additionally, although this is less welcome when it’s a tree in your yard, woodpeckers help spread fungi and other decomposers through the forest. This may not seem important, but nutrient cycles and forest succession wouldn’t function properly without species like woodpeckers mucking about in mycelium. Anyone who has spent time in the forests has noticed dead standing trees riddled with holes. There’s a strong chance a woodpecker helped facilitate the decline of that tree, and for better or worse it will eventually molder into soil. And those snags themselves are important, as my last post posits (Here’s some proof).

There are only four species of woodpeckers I’d regularly expect to find in and around Capitol Hill:

The Northern Flicker (Colaptes auratus) is undoubtedly our most common species. They are far less choosy in habitat, equally at home in a green space or nesting in a telephone pole in an alley. They are often seen on the ground, because they enjoy ants as much as beetle grubs in trees.

Surprisingly, Pileated Woodpeckers, the largest living woodpecker in North America still finds a few nooks and crannies on Capitol Hill. Thanks to large green spaces like Interlaken Park we can occasionally see them. They can find enough of their favorite food, carpenter ants, and have trees large enough both for nesting and roosting in, (it turns out roosting space is just as vital for them, meaning predictions of usable habitat need to include at least twice as many suitable trees).

Our smallest species is the miniature Downy Woodpecker (Dryobates pubescens). While it is a fairly flashy black and white, they easily go unnoticed because they are both small and tend to move about smaller branches instead of tree trunks. Their larger lookalike, the Hairy Woodpecker (Leuconotopicus villosus), may show up from time to time, but is far less common because it requires larger contiguous forests.

Red-breasted Sapsuckers (Sphyrapicus ruber) do fairly well in the urban landscape, particularly when thin skinned trees like those we plant in our gardens, are available. They have a unique habit of creating row upon row of sap “wells” in trees, which attracts insects for them to gobble up. Expect to see more sapsuckers during cold snaps, because they get pushed out of higher elevations when the sap is frozen and they can’t find food.

One of the most interesting adaptations is woodpecker drumming. Woodpeckers communicate territoriality and breeding fitness by drumming, which is much more loud and closely spaced together than investigative pecking for food. In my experiences in dealing with the public and birds, I’ve never seen people more irate than when a woodpecker drumming on their flashing or metal chimney or the like (if this is your problem, here’s some help). It certainly doesn’t help that woodpeckers are more actively displaying in the early hours of the day. People might think woodpeckers are dumb, looking for food and shelter in the wrong places. However, I think it’s the opposite. They’ve figured out how to use the human landscape to their advantage, using our metal bits to help resonate in a landscape with far fewer hollow trees to drum on. That’s far more than many species can say.