Wait—Do Woodpeckers Kill Trees? | Audubon

In the event you’ve ever witnessed a Pileated Woodpecker chiseling away at a tree trunk, you might need puzzled if all that wooden pecking was taking a toll on the tree. Pileated nest holes, in any case, can measure as much as a foot lengthy and lengthen very deep. However worry not: For essentially the most half, North America’s 22 woodpecker species don’t hurt the bushes they hammer on—a lot much less kill them. In truth, the birds play an necessary position in maintaining forests wholesome.

Drumming versus Drilling 

Woodpeckers typically interact in two distinct behaviors: drumming and drilling. Once they drum, they loudly peck on tree limbs or lifeless trunks, benefiting from resonant forest supplies to speak. Whether or not it’s for mating or territorial purposes, a single woodpecker can drum greater than 8,000 instances in a single day. This habits solely scratches the floor of bark and doesn’t harm bushes.

Drilling, then again, generates holes or gashes in a tree. When woodpeckers drill, they’re normally trying to find bugs beneath bark, digging out cavity nests in tree trunks, or, within the case of the Acorn Woodpeckers, creating openings to put aside nuts for later, a storage system often known as a granary. 

Whereas drilling can lead to harm, it is normally not sufficient to hurt a wholesome tree—although the holes could make a tree extra vulnerable to infestations and illness. Woodpeckers and their handiwork additionally aren’t usually detrimental to bushes for one more necessary purpose: The birds are likely to focus their efforts on lifeless or rotting bushes, the varieties crammed to the brim with bugs resembling carpenter ants and beetle larvae. If the tree or limb is not already lifeless, it is probably on its method because of an infestation or the presence of fungi or a tree-specific illness. 

“Woodpeckers are not often the reason for harm,” says Nicholas Antonson, a biologist at California Polytechnic State College who research woodpeckers and different chicken species. “They have a tendency to seek out already broken areas for his or her behaviors. And so, fairly than seeing woodpeckers because the villain, you’ll be able to virtually see them as your first-line arborist.”

How Woodpeckers Can Assist Bushes 

Certainly, woodpeckers and their highly effective beaks could be a boon for bushes by appearing as an indicator of an infestation and even serving to to mitigate the destruction. As an example, woodpeckers eat emerald ash borer beetles, an invasive species that kills ash bushes by gnawing away at their tissue. However one long-running group science mission discovered that Pink-bellied Woodpeckers killed roughly 40 percent of the beetles in a given space when current, leading to a inhabitants spike for the birds.
 

Suzanne Treyger, senior supervisor of the forest conservation program for Audubon New York and Connecticut, is aware of firsthand how the advantages of woodpeckers far outweigh any potential dangers to bushes. “I might say that pests and pathogens and totally different illnesses are going to be extra of a priority with harming bushes than woodpeckers,” Treyger says.

Woodpeckers provide one other important ecosystem service within the nest cavities they create. The birds carve out openings within the softer wooden of lifeless bushes and let the wooden chips fall the place they might contained in the holes to cushion their eggs. These rigorously constructed hollows later change into the houses for lots of of different cavity-nesting chicken species—from owls to bluebirds—across the globe. To not point out the mammals that may additionally take up residence.

When Woodpeckers Do Hurt Bushes 

There’s one form of woodpecker extra prone to hurt or kill bushes than others: sapsuckers. The 4 species of sapsucker—Yellow-bellied, Pink-naped, Pink-breasted, and Williamson’s—faucet sap-filled bushes like maples and hemlocks on a continuous foundation. Within the course of, they bore rows or columns of holes—known as wells—into trunks, revisiting them usually to entry as a lot sap (and as many sap-trapped bugs) as they will. 

Normally, bushes survive these tidy, grid-like preparations, but when the birds return many times, they will generally take off a full ring of bark, girdling and fatally injuring the tree. Though it is a uncommon incidence, there are steps you’ll be able to take to stop sapsuckers from perforating a tree you care about to dying. To maintain the birds at bay, cowl an space they’ve already began tapping with rooster wire, wired mesh, or burlap till they discover a new tree to focus on. 

Nevertheless, in the event you’re not anxious about harm and simply wish to watch nature play out, it may be enjoyable to look at sapsuckers—and any woodpecker, for that matter—do their factor. “Lots of people can acknowledge the drumming, and so they’re very flashy and colourful,” Treyger says. “They’re a charismatic species in our woods.”