Fun Facts About Downy Woodpeckers

• The active little Downy Woodpecker is a familiar sight at backyard feeders and in parks and woodlots, where it joins flocks of chickadees and nuthatches, barely outsizing them. An often acrobatic forager, this black-and-white woodpecker is at home on tiny branches or balancing on slender plant galls, sycamore seed balls, and suet feeders. Downies and their larger lookalike, the Hairy Woodpecker, are one of the first identification challenges that beginning bird watchers master.

• Where they occur, Downy Woodpeckers are the most likely woodpecker species to visit a backyard bird feeder. They prefer suet feeders, but are also fond of black oil sunflower seeds, millet, peanuts, and chunky peanut butter. Occasionally, Downy woodpeckers will drink from oriole and hummingbird feeders as well. 

• The smallest North American woodpecker is the Downy Woodpecker at 6" in length.

• The feather pattern on the back of head of Downy Woodpeckers is unique to every bird and downies may use them to recognize other individual downies.

• Woodpeckers have a better sense of smell than most birds and may be able to detect the strong odor of the formic acid that ants, bark beetles and termites excrete (smells like Sweet Tarts.)

• To help distinguish the difference between a Hairy and a Downy Woodpecker visiting your feeders, look for the Hairy’s chisel-like bill which is much longer than the Downy, which often equals the width of the rest of the head. The Downy’s head is twice as wide as its very short bill.

• Scientific tests have determined that Downy Woodpeckers do actually use the presence or absence of the red patch on the back of other downies head to determine whether they are male of female.

• Male Downy Woodpeckers are dominate over female downies and select the best feeding sites for their own use and defend them against the females.

• Female Downy Woodpeckers have slightly longer tails than do the males. This may be explained by the fact that they spend more time foraging on vertical surfaces, such as tree trunks, and thus use their tail as a brace more often than their male counterparts, which spend