NELSON’S DOWNY WOODPECKER
HABITS
This large race of the downy woodpecker inhabits the wooded regions of northern Alaska and northern Canada, intergrading with Dryobates pubescens medianus in southern Canada and possibly in northern New England.
Dr. H. C. Oberholser (1896a), in describing and naming it, characterizes it as “similar to Dryobates pubescens [=medianus], but averaging larger; the under parts pure white instead of brownish; the lower tail-coverts and outer tail-feathers averaging with much less of black markings; red nuchal band of male averaging somewhat wider.”
Swainson and Richardson (1831) say: “This diminutive but exceedingly industrious Woodpecker is a constant inhabitant of the fur-countries up to the fifty-eighth parallel. It seeks its food principally on the maple, elm, and ash, and, north of latitude 54°, where these trees terminate, on the aspen and birch. Its researches are made mostly, if not wholly, on live trees.”
Dr. E. W. Nelson (1887) writes:
Throughout the Territory [Alaska] where woodland or a growth of bushes and small trees occurs the present bird is certain to be found, and is a resident winter and summer. It has been taken along the entire course of the Yukon as well as at various points on the coast of Bering Sea, and thence south at Kadiak and Sitka. In autumn it is a rather common visitant to the coast of Norton Sound in spite of the lack of timber, and it was not uncommon to see it clinging to the sides of the houses, or to the flagstaff, and other similar supports; after resting awhile, and, perhaps, tapping a few times on the unproductive logs, they would leave for a more promising field. They were seen at times passing from one alder patch to another, on the hill-sides, and they follow the spruces and other trees to the shore of the sea.
While I was camping in spring, at the Yukon mouth, these birds were rather common in the dense bushes along this stream and its tributaries. Their holes were frequently found in the decaying stubs, although I did not find a nest containing eggs. This species appears to frequent deciduous thickets and trees by preference, as, in addition to the various times which I saw it in the interior in winter, while at the Yukon mouth, I always found it about locations where only deciduous trees and bushes were found, and its holes were always made in cottonwood or birch-stubs.
Judged from what little is known about them, the nesting, food, and other habits of Nelson’s downy woodpecker do not differ materially from those of its more southern relatives, except as influenced by its different environment. Living in the far north, where trees are small and scarce, it has to be content to excavate its nest in small trees or low stumps. There are very few eggs in collections; a set of five eggs in the Thayer collection was taken from a hole 4 feet from the ground in a rotten stump, near Fort Saskatchewan, Canada, on June 10, 1898. These eggs are like other eggs of the species, pure white, ovate in shape, and somewhat glossy. The measurements of 31 eggs average 19.54 by 15.43 millimeters; the eggs showing the four extremes measure 21.9 by 16.1, 19.4 by 16.4, 17.5 by 15.0, and 18.65 by 14.28 millimeters.