Woodpeckers Love Ants

BirdNote^®

Woodpeckers Love Ants

Written by Bob Sundstrom

This is BirdNote!

[A Pileated Woodpecker calling and hammering on old trunk]
An expert woodcarver is hard at work preparing a picnic. A 16-inch Pileated Woodpecker is hammering its massive chisel of a bill against a cedar trunk, making large, rectangular incisions – some nearly a foot long.
 [Pileated Woodpecker hammering]
This carpenter seeks out another. Within the trunk swarm many thousands of carpenter ants. The half-inch-long black ants have themselves excavated a nesting colony in the heart of the living tree. The woodpecker’s sticky tongue reaches five inches beyond the tip of the bill into the trunk, lapping up hundreds of ants. More than half of the Pileated’s entire food intake may be ants.
Woodpeckers as a group eat far more ants than do most birds, swallowing them whole. Many other vertebrates studiously avoid ants because of their stings or noxious chemical deterrents, like formic acid. Another member of the woodpecker family, the Northern Flicker, is known to have ingested over five thousand ants in one sitting.
While the Pileated Woodpecker and Northern Flicker also eat a variety of other insects and berries, they always love to have a good supply of ants.  
[Repeat call and excavation sounds]
Writers for BirdNote include Bob Sundstrom, Frances Wood, Ellen Blackstone, and Todd Peterson. Our producer is John Kessler. Executive producer is Chris Peterson. I’m Michael Stein.
###

Sounds of the Pileated Woodpecker provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Recorded by
Producer: John Kessler
Executive Producer: Chris Peterson
© 2011 Tune In to Nature.org      August 2011     Narrator: Michael Stein

ID#082605PIWOKPLU     woodpecker-01b