The Woodpeckers That Are Not Downy or Hairy

Downy and hairy account for most feeder woodpeckers and not all of them, and the rest are individually distinctive.

Northern flicker

The woodpecker on the lawn. Flickers eat ants and forage on the ground far more than in trees, which alone separates them.

Brown with black barring above, a black crescent on the chest, and heavy black spotting below. In flight a bright white rump patch flashes, and the underwings are yellow in eastern birds and red in western ones.

Large — noticeably bigger than a robin — and often heard before seen, giving a long ringing series or a loud single kleer.

Red-bellied woodpecker

Named badly and identified easily. A boldly barred black-and-white back, pale grey face and underparts, and a red cap running from bill to nape in the male, restricted to the nape in the female.

The belly wash the name refers to is faint and almost never seen. Anyone looking for a red belly will not find one.

Common at suet and sunflower feeders across the east, and considerably larger than a downy.

Yellow-bellied sapsucker

A neat black-and-white woodpecker with a red forehead, a long white wing stripe visible at rest, and — in the male — a red throat.

The reliable sign is the damage rather than the bird: neat horizontal rows of small square holes drilled in tree bark. Nothing else makes them, and they persist long after the bird has moved on.

Sapsuckers drink the sap that wells up and eat the insects it attracts, which is why hummingbirds and other species are often found at sapsucker wells.

Pileated woodpecker

Impossible to mistake and worth including because people who see one assume they have seen something impossibly rare.

Crow-sized, black with a flaming red crest, and it excavates large rectangular holes in dead wood that are often the first sign of its presence. Uncommon at feeders but increasingly regular at suet in wooded suburbs.

The nuthatch that is not a woodpecker

White-breasted nuthatches climb trunks and are frequently reported as small woodpeckers.

The giveaway is direction: nuthatches go head-first down a trunk, which no woodpecker does. They also lack the stiff tail that woodpeckers brace against the bark, so they move in short jerky runs rather than hitching upwards.

Getting the pair right first

Downy and hairy remain the hardest genuine pair, and the bill-to-head ratio is what settles them — the method set out in downy or hairy.

Everything else in this group differs enough in size, pattern or behaviour that a reasonable look is enough, which makes woodpeckers one of the more approachable families for someone starting out.

Drumming

Woodpeckers drum to advertise territory rather than to feed, and the pattern is species-specific — length, speed and whether it slows at the end.

It is a genuine identification route in early spring when birds are drumming and leaves are not yet blocking the view, and it is worth learning alongside the calls.

Damage to buildings

Woodpeckers drum on gutters, flashing and siding because metal and hollow cavities carry the sound further than wood does. It is advertising rather than feeding, and it stops when the breeding season does.

Holes drilled into wooden siding are a different matter and usually mean insects in the wall, which is the problem worth addressing rather than the bird.