Dan's Feathursday Feature: Black-backed Woodpecker

With birds, very often things don't occur exactly as the books tell you. I've never seen a Pine Warbler in a pine tree. A Bonaparte's Gull does not squawk with a French accent. An Eastern Meadowlark is not really a lark. Nor is a Western Meadowlark.

But sometimes it does happen just the way it says in the books.

Several summers ago, I found myself five miles down a two-track deep in the Haiwatha National Forest in Michigan's upper peninsula. The road was narrowing, and getting a bit too sandy for my taste, so I found a place to turn around, and started to head back in the direction I had come. I decided to stop in a clearing to give one last listen for the warbler I had come all this way looking for.

I got out of the car and stood still for about ten minutes. It was classic UP forest terrain. Dense waist-high ferns covering a spongy floor of moss, with a canopy of hardwoods, tamaracks and pines. Where I stood, the trees were sparse, as if a forest fire had raged here not many years ago. Old bark hung from the trunks of several charred white pines. A hundred feet away the ground rose and dried out a bit, and the hillside was dotted with more dead trees, thrusting their spires skyward like totem poles erected there by Sasquatch.

I was just thinking to myself, hmm, this looks like it could be good territory for a Black-backed Woodpecker, when I heard something falling from a nearby tree. Large pieces of bark were dropping one after another from the side of one of those charred pines. I looked up, expecting to find a porcupine—that's how large the chunks of bark were. Instead, I saw a pitch black Robin-sized woodpecker, with its back to me, chipping sideways at the loose bark and sending the pieces flying like cards from the hand of a Blackjack dealer. I was looking at a Black-backed Woodpecker. After a few minutes, it flew even closer, to an old, half-dead jack pine, where it continued to send the cards flying.

It was following the script to a T. The books say that the Black-backed Woodpecker is a "burnt-forest specialist," feeding on the wood-boring beetles that thrive on recently burnt trees. It feeds by chipping sideways at the loose bark to expose the beetles and their larvae hiding beneath. It seems to have a nose for forest fires, moving in to a burn as early as three months after the fire burns out. That's probably how long it takes for the beetles to propagate in numbers enough for a good meal. The trees burn, the beetles begin to devour the trees, and the Black-backed Woodpecker lives off the beetles. What a marvelous example of nature's progressive self-restoration.

I watched this impressive bird for about five minutes. Its yellow cap told me it was a male, and it was close enough even to make out a special characteristic of the Black-backed Woodpecker—it has only three toes on each foot. Most woodpeckers have four.

Eventually he flew off to one of Sasquatch's totem poles, and then deeper into the forest. I never saw him again. Three times over the past several years I've returned to that same place, but I've never managed to see or hear a Black-backed Woodpecker again. You can be sure that when hiking in northern Michigan, if I come upon a stand of charred trees, I will look up in search of a Black-backed Woodpecker. If I don't find one, I will settle for second best—I will chip away a few pieces of bark until I find a beetle, and know that a Black-backed Woodpecker is not far away.

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