Bird of the Month: Northern Flicker
Male Northern Flicker. Photo by Jeff Bryant.
By Roger Digges, CCAS Vice-President
While September’s bird of the month resides in Champaign County year-round, its numbers swell in September and October as birds that nested in Canada and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan migrate through our area on their way to wintering grounds in the southern U.S. and central America. The Northern Flicker is one of six members of the woodpecker family that nest in Champaign County. A seventh, the Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, migrates through our area every spring and fall. However, unlike the other six species, you may very well find flickers feeding on the ground rather than searching under the bark of trees. I think of flickers as “groundpeckers” because they hammer their beaks into the ground to locate the tasty larvae of ants and beetles. (They also enjoy flies, moths, butterflies, and snails.) But you may also find flickers perched in trees, safe from potential ground predators (like us, although we don’t intend to predate them), or “drumming” on objects with their bills, often hollow trees or even metal objects, to impress potential mates.
So how do you distinguish Northern Flickers from other woodpeckers? Besides the fact that you can often find them on the ground rather than on tree trunks or branches, they don’t have the black and white color pattern of the other species, but strike an observer as brownish with black barred backs, and creamy merging into tawny undersides spotted with black with a prominent black bib. Like all woodpeckers they have a dash of red, in their case on the nape of their necks. Males sport a black “mustache” which is missing on females. But for me, there are two obvious signs that a flicker is in the area. One is its signature sound, a loud, long staccato call which rises in pitch. The other is the brilliant white patch on its rump which you see when it flies away from you. Both of those clearly say “flicker”!
Where do you find flickers? Walk in the woods this fall or along forest edges. Listen for its characteristic call. Watch for its gleaming white rump as it flies away from you. They do visit yards with trees and occasionally visit feeders, and are fond of black oil sunflower seeds. Cornell Lab’s All About Birds can instruct you how to build a nest box that will attract flickers if you have the right habitat. Otherwise, Northern Flickers nest in tree cavities, either excavating their own or reusing ones they or other woodpeckers created. Females lay 5–8 eggs on a bed of wood chips. Both parents take turns incubating the eggs for 11–13 days, and the young flickers leave the nest in about three and a half to four weeks after exhausting their parents, who also take turns feeding them.
How are Northern Flickers doing? Despite the fact that Partners in Flight rates them as being a species of low conservation concern, the North American Breeding Bird Survey indicates that we had 47% fewer flickers in 2019 than we did in 1966. Still, however, there are about 12 million Northern Flickers in North America. We can protect them best by preserving their habitats, not just in parks and preserves but also in our yards.