Back Acres: Woodpecker's Gone Wild - Check out the Holes this Wood Pecker's Created

I've often heard woodpeckers down in the woods, even more so this winter. I wasn't exactly sure where they were banging, until this morning. I was walking in the back acre woods and came across the woodpecker's trees.

Click the picture below to watch the tree examination Video:

You can tell by how the trees are split and leaning that they are at least half rotten. I'm not sure what made them rot, the bark looked fine on one of them. No excessive moss or mushrooms. The trees are on the edge of this cedar forest and along the rock wall that the farmer used to pile his field rocks onto decades ago. I suspect it has something to do with this or maybe the rocky clay soil. I'll leave that investigation for another day.

You can see the pile of the woodpecker wood chips at the bottom of the tree in the picture above. Luckily the snow has briefly melted so we are able to take this look see.

There are many different kinds of woodpeckers in Ontario alone. Some sip tree sap, some eat bugs off the forest floor, some pull off bark and eat the beetle or other bug infestation, some tap holes in the trees in grids and keep coming back to check their trap lines, and some carve holes and nesting burrows in rotting trees looking for carpenter ants and other bugs. That last kind of woodpecker caught my attention - it sounds like mine - the North American Pileated woodpecker.

Above is a panorama picture of my woodpecker's latest peck of cedar forests.

"The pileated woodpecker is in a class by itself in North America. This large bird feeds almost exclusively by excavating holes and scaling bark. Its preferred food source is carpenter ants (Camponotus sp.) but excavating may uncover termites, wood-boring larvae and even the plump larvae of beetles. They will excavate rotted, decayed and seemingly healthy trees in search of food. The excavations are often ragged as opposed to the regular round holes they excavate for roosting and nesting cavities."

• https://www.isaontario.com/content/woodpeckers-trees-houses

• CC0 stock photo above - https://www.stockvault.net/photo/205834/pileated-woodpecker

If I hear him pecking away down in the forest again I'll set up a camera to capture the woodpecker. I don't mind his pecking, I'm much louder. The suspected Pileated woodpecker is always welcome, for now I'll leave these rotten cedar trees.

In the picture below you can see how big his hole is with the hand comparison.

The picture below is a sample of the farmer's old field rock row, and of one of my favorite trees - it's asking for a tree house or blind.

Have a great day :)