Backyard Nature: The reasons woodpeckers peck at trees – and your home

A pileated woodpecker in Rock Creek Park.

by Marlene Berlin

Woodpeckers are a-wooing.

If you are hiking in Rock Creek Park this time of year, and are hearing the drumming of woodpeckers, there’s a good chance those are males on the hunt for mate.

To amplify the sound, they drum on hollow trees. They might also find a noisy spot on your house or apartment building, like a gutter or part of your roof, or even a garbage can. Utility poles and transformer boxes can also be targets.

The males also use the loud drumming to mark their territories.

Once the courtship reaches the breeding stage, the Cornell Ornithology Lab says the loud drumming should end. But the birds may continue to “hammer on houses” for other reasons.

They could be excavating a hole for a nest or roost. Or they may be on the lookout for a meal of carpenter and leafcutter bee larvae, or grass bagworms.

What do you think these pileated woodpeckers were doing when I encountered them recently in Rock Creek Park?

When woodpeckers peck, they can make impact as many as 20 times per second. Researchers have found that woodpeckers have unusual skull and tongue bone structures that may protect their brains from concussions concussions and other brain injury.

And woodpeckers have a way of making their presence known. In 2009, Cornell researchers looked at more than one thousand houses in the university’s hometown of Ithaca, New York. They found that one third had some kind of issue with woodpeckers – noise or damage. Of deterrents, 2007 Cornell researchers found that reflective streamers worked most consistently. Reports of other effective methods include “windsocks, pinwheels, helium balloons (shiny, bright Mylar balloons are especially effective), strips of aluminum foil, or reflective tape.” Also, covering the area under attack with burlap or taut bird netting and filling any holes with wood putty could prevent further damage.

Red-bellied and pileated woodpeckers are among those that can be seen – and heard – around here. They each have distinctive high-pitched calls. (Listen to the pileated woodpecker call here, and the red-bellied woodpecker here.)

There are 230 woodpecker species around the world. Click here to learn about their traits. And tell us about your woodpecker sightings. Have they been hanging around your home?