This is a first winter male Green Woodpecker – his sex shown by the the red centre that’s starting to appear in his ‘moustache’, and his age apparent from the remnants of juvenile brown and white plumage still showing through his new pale yellow breast feathers. R spotted him digging for ants in the top lawn while I was making lunch today, and I immediately stopped cooking and spent a while trying to photograph him through the frankly filthy glass of the back door. For much of the time he was partly obscured by the patio wall, which didn’t make things any easier, and in the end this was the only clear image I managed to capture.
I’m very fond of Green Woodpeckers, not least because our entire property seems to be founded on a massive ant nest, and when they get tired of living in the garden and feel like a change of scene, the beastly things start trying to move into the house – so a bird that lives almost exclusively on ants is always a welcome visitor. I don’t know how many ants an adult bird gets through, but Romanian scientists studying a brood of seven Green Woodpecker chicks estimated that their parents fed them a total of 1.5 million ants before they fledged. After fledging, an adult pair will split the brood between them and take their offspring to good feeding sites, where they show them how to find and dig for ants. The juveniles remain at least partly dependent on their parents for several weeks, but once they achieve full independence they will lead largely solitary lives, except when they themselves are breeding.
The average lifespan of a Green Woodpecker is thought to be around six years, though the species longevity record currently stands at more than fifteen years. These are largely sedentary birds, rarely straying more than a few hundred metres from their natal tree, and it’s pleasing to me to think that many of the young individuals I’ve seen over the years, being introduced by their parents to the ant nests in our garden, are probably still living around the village and now producing offspring of their own. In an environment like this the biggest threat they face is the difficulty of finding enough food through a hard winter: a prolonged period of snow such as we had three years ago can make ant nests hard to uncover and excavate, leading to high mortality among Green Woodpeckers.
Because they’re shy, it’s often easier to hear these birds than to see them. The distinctive call they make is known as ‘yaffling’, and the bird itself is sometimes called a ‘yaffle’, though I prefer the alternative dialect name of ‘yaffingale’.
