O. M. Bryens (1926) wrote from St. Joseph County, Mich.:
On February 16, 1925, I was able to approach within twelve feet of one of these Woodpeckers busily engaged in digging in a maple stub, two feet in diameter and about twelve feet high. He was after insects whose borings I found later upon examining the wood. I watched him for about an hour.
He seldom gave more than three or four pecks at a time, and would then swing his head round to one side or the other, sometimes raising his scarlet crest. He seldom threw back his head without tossing a chip back of him, and when I examined his work after he had left, later in the day, I found some chips near the stub, which were three inches long and one inch wide. Others half this size had been thrown out on the snow a distance of four feet. The hole was on the west side and measured six inches across and ten inches long, and extended to a depth of six inches toward the heart of the stub. There was another hole six inches square on the south side. The bird seemed to chisel out a section three inches wide across the hole and then move down and cut out another section. The two holes were dug in about two hours.
Of summertime feeding Ora W. Knight (1908) says: “Except the Flicker this is the only species of Woodpecker I have observed feeding on the ground, but this species likes to tear open the ant hills found in open places in the woods and feed on the ants and their larvæ.” He also says that in the fall these birds eat “dogwood berries, choke and black cherries and other wild fruits and berries, also beechnuts and acorns for which it has a decided fondness.”
Dr. Sutton (1930) says:
The food of this species in Pennsylvania, according to official examination of four stomachs, is largely of ants. The stomach and crop of a male specimen weighing nine ounces, collected at Northumberland, Northumberland County, on November 10, 1928, contained 469 carpenter ants (Camponotus herculaneus), most of them so recently swallowed as to permit of counting them easily. The stomach of a female taken at Aitch, Huntingdon County, on November 30, 1928, contained the remains of at least 153 carpenter ants, one small carabid beetle, the legs of a small bug (apparently a squash-bug), and 17 wild grapes, swallowed whole.
F. E. L. Beal (1911) gave the results of examination of the contents of 80 stomachs collected far and wide throughout the range of the species. Animal food amounted to 72.88 percent; vegetable, 27.12 percent. Beetles made up 22.01 percent of the total, and ants 39.91 percent. As many as 2,600 ants were counted in a single stomach. The ants were “mostly of the larger species that live in decaying timber.” Ants and beetles together made up the bulk of the animal food (61.92 percent).
The Biological Survey (A. L. Nelson) has kindly made reply to my inquiry concerning stomach examinations of the subspecies abieticola alone. Data were available from 23 specimens, three collected in January, two in June, two in July, six in October, eight in November, and two in December. They were collected, two in Canada, two in New Brunswick, four in New York, four in Pennsylvania, six in Michigan, two in Illinois, two in Minnesota, and one in Iowa.
Animal food amounted to 83 percent of the whole; vegetable, 17 percent, with but a trace of gravel (one stomach only). The chief item was ants, principally large black ants, such as Camponotus and Crematogaster; this item alone constituted 60 percent of the whole. The animal food otherwise consisted of a variety of beetles and of a very few (2 percent) caterpillars. The vegetable food was made up of wild berries (Ilex, Cassine, Vitis cordifolia, Nyssa sylvatica, and Viburnum nudum—in all, 11 percent of the whole), mast (2 percent), and rotten wood (4 percent).
Catesby’s (1731) assertion, repeated time and again by the earlier writers, that the pileated woodpecker sometimes pierces the husks of maize standing in the field, was almost certainly based on faulty observation. No modern confirmation is to be found of this or of any other predatory practice. To the contrary, the finding after careful investigation (Beal, 1911) is: “The food of the pileated woodpecker does not interest the farmer or horticulturist, for it is obtained entirely from the forest or the wild copses on its edge. This bird does not visit either the orchard or the grain field, and all its work in the forest helps to conserve the timber * * *. Its killing should be strictly prohibited at all times.”