The subspecific name abieticola (= dweller amid fir trees) is in some degree misleading, for, in the Northeastern States at least, the bird is commonly found in forests of mingled conifers and hardwoods; it shows no partiality to firs, nor even to conifers generally; and it cuts its nesting cavities, in the large majority of cases, in the dead and standing trunks of deciduous trees. In the Rocky Mountains, however, according to the Weydemeyers (1928), it prefers growths of larch, yellow pine, and Douglas fir.
It is a denizen of extensive forests. It will adapt itself to second growth—particularly where the young trees have sprung up about some remnant of the old; but in any case it requires wide areas. As forests dwindle to woodlots, along with the wild turkey, the barred owl, and the raven, it disappears. From regions once forested but now devoted to agriculture it is gone; in the mountains, however, in the marginal areas, where wooded ridges extend out to the plains, and in forested swamp lands, it continues. In such territories, indeed, its numbers during the past 50 years have increased, and it has reappeared in localities once deserted. Reports of such recrudescence are many, and they come from widely scattered places, particularly in the States to eastward of the Mississippi River.
Roger T. Peterson (MS.) says: “The pileated woodpecker has greatly increased in the Northeast during the past few years. At one time it was nearly gone from many parts of New York State and southern New England, where it had occurred in fair numbers. The bird disappeared from northern New Jersey about 1880, and from southern New Jersey in 1908. About 1920 W. DeWitt Miller found it again at two or three points in northern New Jersey; and now it is fairly common in many places in the northern part of the State, and as far east as in Bergen County, within 15 miles of New York City. Within the past 5 years it has reappeared in the lower Hudson Valley. It is especially common in some portions of southwestern New York State. In one recent year I found four nests near the city of Jamestown, N. Y. Similar increases have been noted by bird students in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Ohio, and Missouri”—and, he might have added, in Pennsylvania.
Ludlow Griscom (1929) wrote: “I incline to the view that the increase in this Woodpecker is not so much due to conservation, as to its adaptation to less primeval conditions. The generation that regarded this species as a game-bird died off in this Region [the Northeastern States] before it returned.”
Granted that the species shows itself to be adaptable, it still is pertinent to note other ameliorations of circumstance. When lumbering operations have been carried through to completion, when the camps are gone from the woods, and when new growth has begun to spring up, it is generally true that animal life in its larger forms tends to reappear and to increase. Again, the development of more fertile lands in the West has had effect in the abandonment of poorer lands in the East. Extensive areas, in New England particularly, that a hundred years ago were farmed, have now long since returned to wilderness. The forests of second growth, as they approach maturity, may be supposed increasingly to afford the food resources proper to this denizen of the great forests. And, finally, protective laws have been more intelligently framed, more widely adopted, and more generally respected.
The birds range over plain and mountain side. They prefer “the edges of the balsam and cedar swamps, when surrounded with forests of hardwood and hemlocks” (Blackwelder, 1909, Iron County, Mich.). Their nesting places are ordinarily in lowlands, and near water. In the region where I have known them best—the Huron Mountains, in Marquette County, Mich.—I have found the birds to occur in pairs or families at intervals of two or three miles along the course of a river that flows through primeval forest land. This I take to be a fair indication of the saturation point in pileated woodpecker population.
Migration.—Generally speaking, the species is resident wherever found. Some of the earlier naturalists supposed that it retired in winter from the more northerly portions of its range; but none affords any evidence. George Miksch Sutton (1930), when ornithologist for the Game Commission of Pennsylvania, having reviewed the reports of the wardens, said that they tended to indicate a gradual movement of the birds in winter around the eastern end of Lake Erie and southward into Pennsylvania. Such may be the case. On the other hand, it is true that, after the nesting season has passed, and throughout fall and winter, the birds wander and appear in areas where at other seasons they are unknown; and it may be that Dr. Sutton’s wardens were basing their reports upon such seasonal reappearances. More precise observations must be made before it can be asserted with confidence that there is migration in any sense other than that here recognized.
Courtship.—It is usual to find the birds associated in pairs, even after the nesting season has passed; and from this the inference has been drawn (Morrell, 1901; Knight, 1908) that they continue, year after year, constantly mated. Lewis O. Shelley, writing from East Westmoreland, N. H., says (MS.): “It is my belief that the pileated mates for life, for, seen almost daily, one pair is known to have shown no active spring display for the past few years, nor was a third bird (male) seen near.” This inference may be sound; nevertheless, an element of conjecture here should not be overlooked, and further data should be sought.
In some cases, certainly, the birds engage in mating antics, and Edmund W. Arthur (1934) relates an example:
On April 14, 1933, while driving with a companion * * * from Slippery Rock [Pennsylvania] * * * to Grove City, I observed a Pileated Woodpecker * * * flying across the highway a short distance south of Barmore Run. Stopping our car, we got out and followed the bird with our eyes, until it alighted on a tall tree a thousand feet away in the swampy woodland. Presently another, and then a third, were seen. They were quite restless, though apparently fearless, as evidenced by their flying about, alighting in plain view of us upon trees not fifty yards distant. After several minutes one of them—a female we thought—alighted upon a grassy knoll in a pasture to the left of the road, where it walked about for a brief interval, until a second came to the knoll and approached within three or four feet of the first. Then began a curious movement, much resembling the dance of Flickers, wherein with bowing and scraping one bird, stepping sideways, made a circle about the other, who slowly turned, facing the performer. When the dance ceased there was a sudden jerky movement on the part of each, and thereupon they flew away. There are two houses at the intersection, and the people living in one of them told us that a pair of these birds had nested the year before in a maple just in the rear of their house.