Dan's Feathursday Feature: Yellow-bellied Sapsucker

I blame the Yellow-bellied Sapsucker for turning my son from birding—and from me for a while. Actually, I blame the ornithologists who gave the poor bird its English name.

Walking the woods of southwest Michigan one April morning with my barely teen son, he asked if I knew the name of the woodpecker that flew across the path and pasted itself to the side of a large sugar maple just to our right.

“Sure. Yellow-bellied Sapsucker.”

“Get out. Is there really a bird by that name? That is so stupid.”

And with that, a switch was flipped. Until that day, our hikes together had been adventures of discovery. Now they were trudges of drudgery. The formerly “cool” forest suddenly morphed into the “lame” locus of nerdy old man stuff, the epitome of un-coolness. And it got worse. Soon my son’s voice started to deepen, he sprouted facial hair, he sulked, he grunted more than he talked. In a strange twist on birder lingo, that Yellow-bellied Sapsucker was my son’s “spark” bird. And let me tell you, for years after, there were plenty of sparks in our household.

Don’t worry. All ended well once he emerged from the tunnel of adolescence. To paraphrase Mark Twain, when my son was 14 he thought I was the most ignorant human alive, but by the time he turned 24 he was astonished at how much this old man had learned in ten years!

Still, just imagine all the grief that might have been avoided if on that fateful April morning I had been able to respond “Northern Sapsucker,” as the bird is known in Spanish. Or even “Dirty Woodpecker,” as the French call it. But Yellow-bellied Sapsucker! Unfortunately, thanks to Yosemite Sam—as well as Ed Norton and Ralph Kramden (check out YouTube clips of The Honeymooners)—to the average American, the Yellow-bellied Sapsucker has become shorthand for nerdy birder.

I’ll assume that if you’ve read this far, you have risen above adolescent snarkiness and can look beyond this bird’s name to see it for the truly fascinating creature that it is. Here are a few things that I think are cool about the Yellow-bellied Sapsucker.

Woodpeckers in general are not what you would call unobtrusive. The Yellow-bellied Sapsucker is no exception. Its call is a loud squeal that sounds like something between a cat’s meow and a Red-tailed Hawk with indigestion. If its voice does not get your attention, its red crown and bright white shoulder patch will, even when the bird is flying.

But even if you do not hear it call, and don’t manage to spot it flashing from tree to tree, there is a sure-fire way to know if a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker is in the neighborhood. Examine the trunks of the hardwoods around you for rows of small scars circling the trunk. Sometimes there are many rows of scars, lined up to resemble a modern art version of corn on the cob. I used to think those were just natural scars of Midwestern trees, until my grandfather taught me they were made by the Yellow-bellied Sapsucker.

Sapsucker lore has it that one day in ancient times a wise old woodpecker noticed the Ojibwe slicing maple trees, collecting the sap and making a sweet drink from it. When Grandpa Woodpecker poked a bark-deep hole in his maple tree and tasted the sweet ambrosia, his life was changed forever. Thus was born the genus Sphyrapicus, a group of woodpeckers who specialize in tapping trees for their sap. To this day, the maple and the birch are the preferred trees of the Yellow-bellied Sapsucker. They go from tree to tree, opening their tap holes and licking up the sweet sap. Like Vermont syrupers they make the rounds of their taps, reopening them if they get plugged up, drinking the nutritious liquid, and snatching up any insects that were attracted to the sweet sap. Other birds, too, will visit the sapwells, so when you see fresh scars on a tree, be on the lookout not only for a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, but for hummingbirds and warblers, too.

OK, I know you probably think the sapsucker origin myth that I recounted above was actually the other way around—that the Ojibwe probably learned their maple-sugaring from the sapsucker. But that’s my story, and I’m sticking with it. And by the way, if your early-teens child asks you to ID a woodpecker, even if it is a sapsucker, just say it's a flicker, or a Downy Woodpecker. Spare yourself the grief. Don’t introduce the Yellow-bellied Sapsucker until they’re mature enough for it.

Dan's Feathursday Feature is a regular contribution to the COS blog featuring the thoughts, insights and pictures of Chicago birder, Dan Lory on birds of the Chicago region.