Beginning bird watchers often struggle with distinguishing hairy and downy woodpeckers from each other. The field guides focus on differences in the outer tail feather and the relative length of the bill, characters that are not always easy to see in the field. This species pair is one of the common stumbling blocks in identification that bird watchers run across.

If you're a regular feeder watcher, as I am, and you have both hairy and downy woodpeckers at your feeder, you may not have any problem telling the two apart. There is one simple reason for this: Hairy woodpeckers are BIG!

We feeder watchers tend to have another advantage. We see downy woodpeckers frequently, sometimes every day. They are nearly as familiar to us as chickadees and sparrows. We have a fixed image, an almost automatic recognition. Hairies can be far less frequent visitors, and when one shows up it grabs our eye, stops us in our tracks. The subconscious brain has already sorted through the files and yanked the file on hairy woodpecker while the conscious mind is still saying, "Boy, look at the size of that thing!" We already know what it is, even while we are automatically running the checklist: Yes, the bill is as long as the head, and it's thick.

Except in a few areas in the Desert Southwest, downy woodpeckers can be found over most of North America, and they are reasonably frequent visitors to feeders in winter. The range of hairy woodpeckers is actually a little larger, because they are found slightly farther north, but in most areas they are less common, and they are far less frequent feeder birds. The reason for this is related partly to the difference in size and partly to the way the two species divide up the world to avoid competing with each other.

Woodpeckers are well named--the one thing they must have, the only indispensable in their lives, is trees. Downies, however, are the more flexible of the two. They do not need, or even favor, a lot of trees, preferring wooded areas with smaller trees. They are happy in open woods or woodlots, orchards, or suburban areas with scattered trees. Hairies are birds of older woods with large trees, preferring areas that have at least a hundred acres of unbroken or lightly broken forest. They are sometimes found in smaller woods or isolated woodlots, but it is usually because the rest of the forest has been cut out from underneath them and they are stuck. In mountainous areas, hairies are found at higher elevations than downies.

Both species prefer deciduous trees throughout most of their range, tolerating pines only if there are hardwoods mixed in. But at least in the Northwest, hairies are often found in extensive stands of pure pine, where downies almost never occur.

The difference in the woods each prefers is reflected in the way they forage and in their choice of nest sites. Hairy woodpeckers tend to forage on the trunk and large limbs of trees, usually higher off of the ground than downies. Downies frequent the smaller trees and smaller limbs of larger trees, often foraging close to the ground. In hairies, studies suggest that males forage higher in the tree than females. Downy woodpecker studies have shown that males tend to forage on smaller branches with females preferring trunks and larger limbs. There is also another difference. Hairy woodpeckers are deliberate feeders, staying upright and moving slowly on the large branches, gently poking and probing and scaling small bits of bark away in search of food. In contrast, downies are more active, and they are anything but staid. Many people have commented on their acrobatics as they hang upside down from small branches and even twigs, or end up facing headfirst down a tree. They are quick and agile foragers and some of their techniques are almost clown-like.

Downies will even forsake trees when searching for food in winter; more than one bird watcher has been surprised to discover that the gentle tapping coming from the middle of a cornfield in winter is a downy pecking at the dried stalks in search of insects larvae. It is rare to find a hairy woodpecker anyplace but on a tree.

The adaptability of the downy makes it a common bird in many neighborhoods and a regular visitor at the feeder, especially if you have a suet feeder. Both hairy and downy woodpeckers eat almost nothing but insects and insect larvae year-round, but they readily accept a suet substitute. In the wild they rarely take seeds, but downies will come to feeders for sunflower seed at times, especially if natural foods are in short supply or the weather is especially cold or ice has coated the trees.

Unless your house is in, or backed up to, an extensive older forest, a visit from a hairy woodpecker is an unexpected treat. It happens sometimes, because in winter hairy woodpeckers are solitary, the female holding the previous summer's territory and the male moving a respectful distance to find his own winter place. If he is successful, he will be back in late winter, and the pair will reunite. If not, well there's always another male around.

Hairy woodpeckers are not gregarious. They rarely join other birds in a feeding flock, and it is very unusual to see two hairies together unless you are close to the nest or the young have just hatched. Downies are far more convivial. They tend to join feeding flocks in the winter, mixing with chickadees, titmice, creepers, and nuthatches as they make the feeding rounds. Sometimes a feeding flock will contain three or four downy woodpeckers, though two is more typical. Downies are less shy around humans, too. It is not unusual to be walking in the woods, or standing in the yard close to the feeder, and have a downy energetically working on a tree branch or the suet only a dozen feet away. Hairies slip away as you approach, always a tree or two ahead of you. To get a good look at one on the suet feeder you have to stay indoors; they are shy birds.

Although the females stay on the territory in both species and the males usually have to go off on their own, the males tend to dominate the females at the feeder, driving them off or displacing them until they have their fill. The red patch on the back of the head of the males makes it easy to observe this dominance if you have both sexes coming to your feeder.

Artwork by Julie Zickefoose


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