Julian K. Potter (1912) noticed that sparrows bothered his woodpeckers considerably about their roosting holes and saw one of them fighting two starlings for the possession of a cavity, but all were eventually driven away and learned the lesson of “no trespass.” He says: “On one occasion, when I watched the woodpeckers until dark, I found that one went to roost in the nesting-hole about dusk, and the other, probably the male, shortly after went into an old hole in the same dead tree higher up.”
Mrs. John Franklin Kyler (1927) gives an interesting account of a red-headed woodpecker that she raised by hand from the nest, beginning before the young bird had opened its eyes; it developed into a very satisfactory pet, with marked affection for its foster mother; anyone who wants to try raising young birds could learn much by reading her story.
Voice.—Bendire (1895) writes: “Its ordinary call note is a loud ‘tchur-tchur’; when chasing each other a shrill note like ‘chärr-chärr’ is frequently uttered, and alarm is expressed by a harsh, rattling note, as well as by one which, according to Mr. Otto Widmann, is indistinguishable from the note of the Tree-frog (Hyla arborea). He tells me that both bird and frog sometimes answer each other.”
Describing their spring notes, W. L. Dawson (1903) says:
Then the woods and groves soon resound with their loud calls, Quee-o—quee-o—queer. These queer cries are not unpleasant, but the birds are a noisy lot at best. When one of them flies into a tree where others are gathered, all set up an outcry of yarrow, yarrow, yarrow, which does not subside until the newcomer has had time to shake hands all around at least twice. Besides these more familiar sounds the red-heads boast an unfathomed repertory of chirping, cackling, and raucous noises. The youngsters, especially,—awkward, saucy fellows that most of them are—sometimes get together and raise a fearful racket until some of the older ones, out-stentored, interpose.
Field marks.—The red-headed woodpecker is so conspicuously marked that it hardly could be mistaken for anything else. The large white areas in the wings and on the rump are much in evidence, in any plumage, especially in flight. The bright red of the entire head and neck and the plain white breast of the adult are also very conspicuous.
Enemies.—The red-headed woodpecker has some bad habits, which have at times caused considerable damage to property, arousing the enmity of those who have suffered from its depredations and resulting in the destruction of large numbers of these birds. Raids on cultivated fruits have given these woodpeckers a bad name and many have been killed by fruit growers. Audubon (1842) asserts that as many as “a hundred have been shot upon a single cherry tree in one day. Pears, peaches, apples, figs, mulberries, and even peas, are thus attacked.”
They do considerable damage to pole lines by excavating their nests in them. An editorial in The Osprey (vol. 1, p. 147) quotes, as follows, from an article in the Kansas City Star:
The little red-headed woodpecker has become such a nuisance on the electric lines of the metropolitan street railway system, that it has become necessary to appoint an official woodpecker exterminator. The title has been conferred on Coffee Rice, an Independence young man, and yesterday he killed nineteen of the destructive birds on the Independence line. The woodpeckers attack the large poles which hold up the feed cables and dig holes into the center and downward to a depth of more than a foot. * * * The result is that in a season the water gets into the heart of the pole and it rots off and breaks, requiring a new pole to be set up; whereas, ordinarily, the life of the big pole is several years. A large number of the electric line poles have been ruined this way, and there was a threatened loss of many thousand dollars unless the pest was checked.
Red-headed woodpeckers seem to be oftener killed on highways by speeding automobiles than any other species, as attested by several observers. Dr. Dayton Stoner (1932) made some observations on this point on an automobile trip, on July 15, 1924, for a distance of 211 miles on well-graveled roads in Iowa. He says: