ROCKY MOUNTAIN HAIRY WOODPECKER
HABITS
This large, white-breasted hairy woodpecker inhabits the Rocky Mountain region, in the Canadian and Transition Zones, from central British Columbia and Montana southward to eastern Utah and northern New Mexico, and eastward to western South Dakota and western Nebraska. Ridgway (1914) characterizes it as “similar, in large size and whiteness of under parts, to D. v. septentrionalis, but with white spots on wing-coverts much reduced in size or number, or altogether wanting.” It evidently intergrades with septentrionalis in Montana and Wyoming and probably with the more western races west of the Rocky Mountains.
Milton P. Skinner tells me that in the Yellowstone National Park it “occurs at all elevations from the lowest at 5,500 feet to timberline at 9,500 feet above sea level, but never far from a tree of some kind. It is a resident bird here but moves down from the mountain heights at the approach of winter.”
Aretas A. Saunders (1921) says of its status in Montana: “A common permanent resident throughout the western half of the state in the mountains. Winters mainly in the valleys in cottonwood groves, but does not breed there. * * * The eastern limits of its range are evidently in the eastern foothills of the mountains. Just what form breeds in the more eastern mountain ranges is not definitely determined. In the mountains this bird has been recorded by all observers. It is common everywhere, and usually the commonest of the mountain woodpeckers.”
Nesting.—The following remarks by Major Bendire (1895), under hyloscopus, evidently refer to this subspecies: “Mr. Denis Gale found it breeding in Boulder County, Colorado, on May 28, 1886, in a live aspen tree, at an altitude of about 8,500 feet. The nest contained five eggs, in which incubation was somewhat advanced. Mr. William G. Smith also reports it as common in Colorado, coming down into the valleys in winter. He says it is the earliest of the Woodpeckers to breed, that it commences nesting in the latter part of April, and usually excavates its holes in old dead pines, frequently at a considerable distance from the ground, and that he has seen full-grown young by June 1.”
J. K. Jensen (1923) says of this woodpecker, in northern Santa Fe County, N. Mex.:
Quite common in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, from 8,000 to 11,000 feet. June 21, 1920, I found a nest thirty feet up in a large quaking aspen. This tree stands on the edge of a place where an avalanche has plowed its way down through the timber on the mountain side, depositing trees and rocks in a great heap for hundreds of feet around the tree. The nest contained young, and judging from the noise they made, were quite well developed. The parent birds were very noisy.
May 22, 1921, I made my way through four feet of snow to the same tree. A new nest had been made, and the female flew off when I was about 150 feet away. I cut into the nest and found a set of four eggs on which incubation had just commenced. The altitude at this point is 11,000 feet. May 26, 1922, I found a nest with young about seventy-five feet up in an aspen. This was in Santa Fe Canyon at an altitude of 8,000 feet.
Eggs.—The eggs of the Rocky Mountain hairy woodpecker are similar to the eggs of other hairy woodpeckers of similar size. The measurements of 33 eggs average 24.89 by 18.49 millimeters; the eggs showing the four extremes measure 28.08 by 18.03, 27.0 by 20.1, 23.37 by 17.78, and 24.38 by 17.27 millimeters.
Food.—Mr. Skinner says, in his notes, that this woodpecker “seeks its food on the trunks of lodgepole and flexilis pines, cedars, firs, aspens, willows, and even electric-light and telephone poles; it prefers dead and diseased trees and stubs to work on, probably because of more borers and grubs. At Basin, and over 7,000 feet elevation, I found a female where I could watch her, only 5 feet away from the lodgepole trunk on which she was working. She worked down, tapping here and there as she went. Whenever a tap revealed a borer, she scaled off the bark with quick right and left strokes, having a slight lever motion at the end, and always secured from one to six bark-borer grubs. Evidently the tap told her whether it was worth while to search further, for she never made a mistake and performed no useless labor.”
J. A. Munro (1930) writes: “During the winter of 1928-29 a male hairy woodpecker frequently was seen feeding on Virginia creeper berries in competition with several red-shafted flickers. On one occasion the same bird visited an apple tree, attracted by a few apples that still clung to the bare branches. Standing crossways on a branch, in the ordinary position of a perching bird, he rapidly stabbed his bill downward into the top of an apple. After doing this several times he flew to another portion of the tree and repeated the performance.”