The three young crowded to the hole as soon as a parent appeared anywhere in the neighborhood and eagerly stretched forth their heads and necks. * * * They were always hungry and screamed with rasping voices for food, once or twice they uttered low whinnies. The adult inserted its bill to its full length into the throats of the young and vigorously regurgitated and pumped in the nourishment. * * * After feeding the young, the female on several occasions, the male on one, entered the nest, to emerge after a minute or two and glide away. Once I detected a white piece in the bill, once, something dark, but the other times nothing at all.
Herbert L. Stoddard (1917) has noted the “hissing” noise of the young within the nesting cavity when the trunk is jarred, “similar to young flickers, but a great deal louder.”
When the young have flown from the nest, the cavity is not utterly abandoned. I once saw one of the parent birds reenter at midday a cavity from which the young had recently flown and remain within for 40 minutes. Why, I know not. The mate accompanied this returning bird and waited near by. Maurice Brooks writes (MS.): “Nest cavities are sometimes used as roosting places after the nesting season. On the evening of August 2, 1937, at Jacksons Mill [Lewis County, W. Va.], I saw six birds (two adults and four young) enter a cavity that had held a nest earlier in the season. This was probably the brood of the year, with the parents.”
Food.—The pileated woodpecker lives upon insects that infest standing and fallen timber and supplements this diet with wild berries and acorns.
Ants are the chief item of food. It is in pursuit of ants that the woodpecker cuts its great furrows in the boles of standing trees, living and dead. On examination the heart wood exposed by the woodpecker’s operations will be found to have been penetrated by the labyrinthine passageways of the great carpenter ants, Camponotus herculeanus (Linnaeus).
All the observations of others that have come to my attention upon the woodpecker when actually engaged in cutting these great trunk-penetrating chasms have been made in winter and early in spring, and with them my own are in agreement. It is a natural surmise that only in winter is such heavy work done, since in summer proper food is more easily available. Another surmise along the same lines is that the disappearance of the bird from particular areas, followed after an interval of years by reappearance, may perhaps have occurred in correspondence with precisely such a fluctuation in its essential, wintertime food supply: it must find, when the ground is snow-covered, ant-infested trunks of large trees.
In September I once made leisurely observation upon a bird at work upon a dead but standing hemlock tree. With swinging, obliquely directed blows it was splitting off the outer leaves of the scalelike bark and pausing intermittently with head turned to the trunk, licking up, as I supposed, the insect life thus exposed. Again, in September, I came upon a pair feeding together upon the ground. They had been tearing up a carpet of moss that spread over damp surfaces both of wood and of rock, and I thought that their prey must be insect life that they were finding in the moss itself.
And yet again, on September 21, I watched for many minutes an adult female feeding on a charred and decayed stump that remained in a young forest of jack pines. She was perched about a foot from the ground. Her method was by deliberate and swinging blows to break away platelike fragments of still firm wood, and then to intrude her bill and search with her tongue (as was evident) the opened cavity. This licking was always, or nearly always, upward, and often the head was turned, crown inward, throat outward. A jay might call or some other forest sound be heard, and the bird would pause, listen for an instant, and then resume her work. A day or two later I visited the stump and with my knife made an incision in it, and I found it to be the home of a colony of ants—not of the large Camponotus but of a smaller, wine-black species about a quarter of an inch long. The body of the stump was honeycombed with their galleries.
Of the major wintertime operations Vickers (1910) has written:
Like the flicker, the [pileated woodpecker] is a great lover of ants, which accordingly occupy a large place in his bill-of-fare. So, to dine on the big black timber ants, which are his special delight, he drives holes to the very heart of growing forest trees, tapping the central chamber of the colony, where, in winter, he finds the dormant swarm unable to move and feasts upon them at leisure.... And the Log-cock makes no mistakes, though man might find no outward sign of an ant-tree. Doubtless that strong formic smell, coupled with his experience in sounding tree trunks,—as a man tells a ripe watermelon by the plunk of it,—enables him not only to find the tree, but, what is more remarkable, to drive his hole with such precision that he taps the heart of the community.