A Conversation about Woodpecker Headaches

Flicker drill holes

Woodpeckers. Who doesn’t admire those little hammerheads? But humans always want to know how things work and we wonder why we can’t bang our heads against hard things without getting headaches. And there’s an entire tribe of birds that do exactly that. Every continent has some type of native woodpecker, with the exception of the area of Australia.

The commonest woodpeckers native to our area are easy to identify. Three are called woodpeckers… the Pileated, Downy and Hairy; and then there are Sapsuckers and Flickers, whose names suggest their different lifestyles.

The Pileated woodpecker’s Latin name translates to “tree-beating cap wearer”, because it drums noisily on trees and has a pointed red crest. Hairy Woodpecker’s Latin name translates to “black-marked shaggy woodpecker”, while its smaller cousin, the Downy woodpecker has the species name pubescens, which translates to downy, or fluffy. The Pileated is about the size of a crow, the Hairy the size of a robin, and the Downy the size of a sparrow. The Pileated looks like the cartoon Woody Woodpecker, and the other two are very similar to each other, with all of them having black and white markings and distinctive red markings on their heads.

Their cousins the Northern Flickers are fond of hunting ants in the soil. They drum the same way as the woodpeckers, but in the soil as well as the trees. They are about the size of doves, and can be mistaken for them because their backs are often brown. But once you see their faces, with red moustaches and black bibs, their personality shines. Watching one fly away makes it clear why they are also called yellow shafted Flickers… the outer tail feathers are revealed, a bright yellow.

Last but not least, the yellow-bellied Sapsucker. These have the black and white with red classic woodpecker look, but they also sport a yellowish color on their belly. They’re about the size of a robin and drill rows of small holes in a tree’s bark to harvest the sap.

So what about all that head banging? Don’t they have headaches? It turns out that their heads are constructed so that their hyoid bone (involved in the working of the tongue in people, too) is wrapped around the inside of their heads, wrapped in specialized muscle and tucked into a skull constructed of special spongy forehead bones. The hyoid/tongue apparatus allows for the tongue to be stored in the skull like a hose on a reel. This also serves as a seatbelt for the brain. The tongue has to reach into the holes the bird drills, so many woodpecker tongues are so long they are the equivalent of a human tongue being two feet long. And the clever adaptations over millennia have resulted in species- specific differences. Some tongues have sticky tips, some are barbed, some are better to suck liquids than snag insects. All with no headaches, the scientists say.

A hint and a warning: they all love suet and birdseed, and are easy to attract and admire. BUT just remember… bird watching is addictive.

What does a woodpecker's tongue look like?

It depends! Although they all share the same basic anatomy, different woodpecker species have different tongues that are specialized for snagging various types of food.

The Northern Flicker's extra-long tongue, for example, is sticky and relatively smooth, perfect for snaking deep into anthills to capture and retrieve ants. Pileated Woodpecker tongues, on the other hand, are relatively short, with barbed tips for extracting prey from bark crevices — maybe not what you'd expect from such a large woodpecker.

Sapsuckers, which mostly consume tree sap, may have the most interesting apparatus of all. Their brush-tipped tongues can lap up oozing sap by capillary action. Across a small enough diameter, the surface tension between water molecules and the attraction between these molecules and surrounding surfaces can actually be stronger than gravity. This is what causes water to “climb” the fibers of a paper towel, and it also helps sapsuckers wick tree sap up their brushy tongues and into their mouths. Hummingbirds have a similar adaptation for drinking nectar out of flowers.