Wildlife Watching Wednesday: Yellow-Bellied Sapsuckers Are Unusual Woodpeckers
By: Tom Berg
Everyone who has spent any amount of time outside has seen or heard a woodpecker at one time or another. Several species live in the eastern half of the United States, including red-headed woodpeckers, red-bellied, downy, hairy, pileated and yellow-bellied sapsuckers. One of the most interesting, though, is the yellow-bellied sapsucker.
Yellow-bellied sapsuckers are medium-sized woodpeckers (about the size of a Robin) that migrate through the Midwest in the spring and fall. They are mostly black and white and they have a bright red patch on their forehead. The males also have a bright red throat. Their belly is somewhat yellowish, although sometimes it looks more like an off-white color with a lot of black and white streaking and speckling.
Unlike most woodpeckers that hammer away at dead trees to find insects to eat, yellow-bellied sapsuckers drill holes in live trees in search of sugary sap (hence the name sapsucker). Their holes are not drilled at random, either. They are often drilled in nicely spaced, almost perfectly horizontal rows. They prefer trees like maple, birch and hickory because their sap has a high sugar content.
Although tree sap is the main source of nourishment for yellow-bellied sapsuckers, they also eat plenty of insects. Many kinds of ants are frequently attracted to sugary tree sap, and sapsuckers gladly snap-up any ants that are nearby or stuck in the sap. They also eat caterpillars, spiders, beetles and other insects that crawl on or hide under the tree bark.
Yellow-bellied sapsuckers are the only woodpecker specie in the eastern half of the country that is completely migratory. Southern Illinois and southern Indiana marks the northern edge of their wintering habitat, with the southern boundary stretching through all of the southeastern United States and most of Central America. They migrate much farther north in the spring on the way to their breeding grounds. Most of these birds breed in Canada, but the northern US states of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, North Dakota, and even New York and Pennsylvania have large breeding populations.
Yellow-bellied sapsuckers are cool. Watch for them during the upcoming fall migration as they head south again!
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