HABITS
The above name is now restricted to the pileated woodpeckers of the Lower Austral forests of the Southern United States, except southern Florida, east of the Rocky Mountains. When Outram Bangs (1898) applied the name abieticola, to the northern race, he said: “Linnaeus based his Picus pileatus on Catesby and Kalm. Taking Catesby as the best authority, southern South Carolina must be considered the type locality of the species, and birds from this region are as extreme of the southern race as those from Florida.”
The southern pileated woodpecker is decidedly smaller than the northern bird and somewhat darker in coloration. Ridgway (1914) says of this race, in a footnote: “Some of the more northern examples are quite as slaty as the extreme northern form (P. p. abieticola) but they are distinctly smaller. In other words, I have restricted the name pileatus to an intermediate form, characterized by the small size of P. p. floridanus combined with an appreciably lighter (more slaty or sooty) coloration, often approaching closely the lightness of hue of P. p. abieticola.”
Arthur T. Wayne (1910) says that in South Carolina “this fine species is abundant wherever the forest is of a primeval nature, but where the heavy growth has been cut away it is seldom met with.” Wright and Harper (1913), writing of its haunts in southern Georgia, say: “With the exception of the red-bellied woodpecker, this is the most abundant member of its family in the Okefinokee. In fact, we saw as many as four Pileated Woodpeckers in a single tree. In every part of the swamp—especially the cypress bays, but also the hammocks and the piny woods on the islands, and even the ‘heads’ on the prairies—these magnificent birds are at home.”
George Finlay Simmons (1925) says that in the Austin region of Texas this woodpecker lives in the “wilder country only; cypress swamps, and the most heavily timbered bottomlands, generally in very thinly settled sections; post oak woods on gravelly river terraces; edges of woodland meadows; along margins of both large and small streams; Austroriparian forests; in or near edges of timber, venturing out onto fields to feed.”
Charles R. Stockard (1904) says of his experience with this species in Mississippi:
During three seasons seventeen nests were watched in Adams County. In the vicinity where observations were made every small woods had its pair of these large woodpeckers. The individuals of this species seemed to occupy very small feeding areas. Of the seven nests that were found in 1902 five pairs of the birds were located in their respective woods during the previous December and January. Whenever a pair was once seen feeding in a wood during the winter the same pair could always be found very close to that place. At the beginning of the nesting season they would invariably make their burrow in some dead but sound tree near the edge of the brake. From continued observation it appeared certain that whenever a pair were found in a small wood during the winter they were sure to nest there the following spring. * * *
In four instances, all of which had lost their eggs the year before, the birds built their new burrows in their several woods within a distance of about one quarter of a mile from the previous nest site. These four are the only cases which were watched with special care.
Nesting.—The only nests of this race that I have seen were shown to me by A. T. Wayne, on May 19, 1915, near Mount Pleasant, S. C. They were in tall, dead pine trees (Pinus taeda) in a heavily forested region of open, mixed woods. One was 43 feet from the ground; he had taken three fresh eggs from this nest on April 24, 1915. The other I estimated as over 60 feet up, but he said it was 80 feet from the ground; it probably held young at that time, as both birds were much in evidence and very noisy. Mr. Wayne told me that these two pairs of birds had nested in this tract of timber for many years. He writes (1910) regarding their nesting habits:
If the season is a forward one the birds mate early in February and towards the latter part of the month begin to excavate their hole, which requires exactly a month for completion. During the month of March, 1904, I made observations on a pair which excavated their hole in a dead pine. On March 21, the opening was commenced by the female, who drilled a small hole, and by degrees enlarged it to the size of a silver dollar. The male assisted in the excavation, but the female did by far the larger part of the work. The size of the aperture was not increased until necessary to admit the shoulders of the bird. I visited these birds every day in order to note the progress of their work, and, being so accustomed to seeing me, they were utterly fearless and I could, at any time, approach within twenty feet without hindering the work, although the hole was only about thirty feet from the ground. This hole was completed on April 21, and the first egg was laid the following morning. * * * In this case the excavation was made under a dead limb, and was about eighteen inches deep, being hollowed out more on one side than the other. This woodpecker is so attached to the tree in which it has first made its nest that it continues to cling to it as long as it can find a suitable spot at which to excavate a new hole. It never uses the same hole a second time. I know of a pair of these birds which resorted to the same tree for four consecutive years, and each year they excavated a new hole. * * *