A. V. Goodpasture (1909), of Nashville, Tenn., made some interesting observations on the feeding habits of this woodpecker. He watched one preparing insect food for its young on a stump, some 4 feet high, near its nest, and says:
When one of the woodpeckers came in, it did not go directly to the nest, but always alighted first on this stump, where it hammered away for a time, then proceeded to the nest with a shapeless mass in its beak. My glass having failed to disclose their object in thus lighting and hammering on the stump before feeding their young, I went down to reconnoiter. The place looked like a field hospital after a severe engagement. There were wings, and wing-covers, heads and legs strewn around the stump in great profusion. Then I understood it all. The stump was their meat-block, and they were preparing the food for their young by removing the hard and indigestible parts. They dispatched this work with much dexterity, without using their feet to confine the insect; they laid it on the stump, and, with the bill alone, succeeded in removing the undesirable parts.
The kinds of insects whose remains were found there was a study. They were almost as gaudy as the woodpecker himself. * * * Woodpeckers can undoubtedly distinguish between colors; they find the ruddiest apple and the rosiest peach in the orchard. In like manner, they seem to be attracted by bright-colored insects. They prefer beautiful butterflies, silky moths, and brilliant beetles. The favorite food of this pair was the June-bug; not the plain brown beetle of the northern states, but the beautiful green and gold June-bug of the South—associated in the mind with sultry summer days, and ripe blackberries, on which he feeds. * * *
I found not only the dismembered wing-covers of the June-bug around the Woodpecker’s meat-block, but, in a pit on the splintered top of the stump, I found a live June-bug. And what a prison he was in! It was a thousand times worse than the Black Hole of Calcutta. They had turned him on his back and pounded him into a cavity that so exactly fitted him that he could move nothing but his legs, which were plying like weaver’s shuttles in the empty air. I always found the June-bugs deposited on their backs, and always alive.
The red-headed woodpecker also shares with the California woodpecker the provident habit of storing acorns and nuts. Fannie Hardy Eckstorm (1901) says:
Lately it has been discovered that they not only eat beechnuts all the fall, but store them up for winter use. This time the observation was made in Indiana. There, when the nuts were abundant, the red-heads were seen busily carrying them off. Their accumulations were found in all sorts of places; cavities in old tree-trunks contained nuts by the handful; knot-holes, cracks, crevices, seams in the barns were filled full of nuts. Nuts were tucked into the cracks in fence-posts; they were driven into railroad ties; they were pounded in between the shingles on the roofs; if a board was sprung out, the space behind it was filled with nuts, and bark or wood was often brought to cover over the gathered store.
Unlike the California woodpecker, it does not make holes for the reception of the nuts but uses what cavities it can find. Dr. Thomas S. Roberts (1932) says that, on the outskirts of St. Paul, “a redhead spent most of October putting acorns into cracks and climbing-iron holes in a telephone pole and under the shingles of a near-by house. One crack was closely plugged for a distance of twenty feet. When the nuts were too large for the cracks they were split and driven in in pieces.”
George A. Dorsey (1926) tells of an amusing attempt of a young redhead to fill a hole in a telephone pole:
Finally he found a hole to his liking, and, chattering as he worked, he drove the acorn in. Imagine my surprise when I saw a couple of acorns fall out on the other side of the pole! The hole was bored straight through the pole, and the Woodpecker was wasting his time by pushing the acorns through. He seemed to know that something was wrong, but couldn’t quite reason it out. He would chatter agitatedly and hitch around the pole to examine the other side of the pole, but would finally give it up and go off for another acorn. I watched him poke acorns in the hole several times, only to have some of the ones he had previously placed there fall out on the other side. On the ground under the pole was about a double handful of acorns that had fallen out.
E. D. Nauman (1932) saw a house mouse running across a paved street, but it had not gone very far when a red-headed woodpecker “darted down out of the grove and made an attack upon it. The woodpecker struck the mouse several hard and vicious blows with its stout bill, rolling and tossing it over and over. It appeared that a moment more of such treatment must have finished the mouse, had not a vehicle approached just at that instant, threatening to crush both the red-head and its prey. The bird darted away just in time to save itself, and the mouse, not having been struck by the wheels, hurriedly limped to the edge of the pavement, got over the curb with difficulty, and hid in the grass. The red-head flew back immediately to see what had become of its prospect for dinner, but the mouse was so well hidden that the bird had to give up the chase.”