The Northern Flicker:
This week I would like to talk about one of my favorite birds. I love watching them and listening to them. They have a very unique call. You’ve seen them flying around with their flashy red underwing and bold white rump. They’re regular visitors on my property and probably to your backyards too. They are among the 23 North American woodpeckers. Some people call them the “Clown among the birds”. They are the most common but the least woodpecker like of them all. We call them Flickers.
Unlike its tree climbing cousins, the northern flicker spends most of its life on the ground, probing with its bill into underground tunnels that conceal its favorite treat, ants. Flickers eat more ants than any other bird in North America, and they are handily equipped to do so. The woodpecker tongue is one of the most amazing adaptations in the animal world and the flicker’s tongue defies imagination. The fleshy part of a woodpecker tongue is elongated and attached to a complex system of bones and muscles. The base of the tongue splits to form an elongated “Y” that stretches back into the woodpecker’s head.
Conspicuous and ubiquitous, the northern flicker is hard to miss. Any large brown woodpecker hopping around on the open ground is a dead giveaway. In North America, only the pileated woodpeckers are larger. Some folks may confuse those birds, but the flicker stands alone. Their flight style is more direct than that of the typical undulating woodpecker. A perched flicker displays a brownish “zebra-backed” pattern above, with a sharp black breast shield and a grayish belly covered with black spots.
Flickers are just as easily heard as seen, with two primary calls heard most frequently: the single call note, sounding like a “kee’er” or “Kee’ew” and the territorial or courtship rapid series of “Kee, Kee, Kee” notes. Its drum roll is delivered at a rapid steady cadence. It is easy to distinguish the Flicker from other woodpecker species.
Flickers are known to breed in Northern Canada and winter in Southern California, Southern Arizona, and Northern Mexico. Over the last couple of decades they are finding flickers staying year round in the Washington and Oregon to Southern California area.
Did you know?
• The northern flicker is the state bird of Alabama, where it’s known as the yellowhammer.
• Flickers are devoted mates during the summer breeding season, but alliances end in fall, with the flicker taking new mates the following year.
Their diet is about 60% animal/insect and 40% vegetable. Most of the animal portion is ants and the veggie part is berries.
Now you know the Northern Flicker. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.
The above is from “Bird Watchers Digest” and Harry Johnson.