This showy and noisy woodpecker enjoys a wide distribution throughout much of the eastern half of the United States, except the most northern and northeastern States. Throughout much of this range, it is one of the commonest and most conspicuous of the woodpeckers. Arthur H. Howell (1932) writes: “In Florida, red-bellied woodpeckers are found chiefly in hammocks, groves, and wet bottomland timber, less commonly in the pine woods and the cypress swamps. * * * These woodpeckers are not particularly shy, and they often visit dooryards and orchards.” In Texas, according to George Finlay Simmons (1925), its favorite haunts are “heavily timbered bottom lands or swampy woods; open deciduous or mixed coniferous woodlands with very large trees; heavy woods of oak and elm along river and creek bottoms; shade trees and dead trees in town.” Major Bendire (1895) says: “Throughout the northern portions of its range it prefers deciduous or mixed forests to coniferous, but in the south it is apparently as common in the flat, low pine woods as in the oak hammocks. Newly cleared lands in which numbers of girdled trees still remain standing are favorite resorts for this as well as other species.”
Nesting.—Bendire (1895) writes:
Birds that migrate from the northern portions of their range usually arrive on their breeding grounds rather early, sometimes by March 20, and shortly afterwards preparations for nesting are commenced. A suitable site is readily found in the decayed top of some tree, or in an old stump, near a stream along the edges of a pasture, or close to some road, and less often farther in the center of a forest. Deciduous trees, especially the softer wooded ones, such as elms, basswood, maple, chestnut, poplar, willow, and sycamore, are preferred to the harder kinds, such as ash, hickory, oak, etc. In northern Florida they nest frequently in pines. Several excavations are often found in the same tree in which the nest is located, and occasionally the same site, with slight repairs, is used for more than one season. * * *
Both sexes assist in excavating the nesting site, as well as in incubation, which lasts about fourteen days. The sites selected are usually from 5 to 70 feet from the ground, and resemble those of our Woodpeckers in every respect, averaging about 12 inches in depth. It takes from seven to ten days to excavate a nest, and frequently the birds rest a week afterwards before beginning to lay; an egg is deposited daily, and from three to five are usually laid to a set, rarely more.
Mr. Howell (1932) says that in Florida “almost any kind of a tree will satisfy the birds for a nesting site, but a partly decayed stub seemingly is preferred. Where cabbage palms occur, a dead stub of that tree is often chosen, and cavities in oaks, cypresses, pines, and other trees are frequently utilized, the nesting hole being anywhere from 5 to 70 feet from the ground, usually, however, under 40 feet. Nesting begins in April and continues until June.” The only nest I ever examined in Florida was found on April 25, 1903, on one of the Bowlegs Keys, in the Bay of Florida; it was placed in a dead branch of a black mangrove; the cavity was about 14 inches deep and contained four fresh eggs.
Mr. Simmons (1925) says that in Texas this woodpecker nests in “dead limbs of stumps of hackberry, Chinaberry, cedar elm, pecan, and American water elm trees, particularly the rotten, shaky, skeleton upper-parts of living hackberry trees in backyards, or in telegraph poles along city streets and alleys.” In a small village in Texas I once found a nest containing three eggs in a fencepost near one of the houses.
Various observers have given quite different measurements of the nesting cavity. Mr. Simmons (1925) says: “Entrance, diameter 1.75 to 1.96. Cavity, depth 10 to 12; widest diameter near bottom (3 above eggs) 5.25.” William H. Fisher (1903) found a nest in Maryland in which “the opening measured 2 by 2¼ inches and it was 5 inches from the outer edge of the hole to the back wall.”
Charles R. Stockard (1904) located a nest in Mississippi, of which he says:
In the spring of 1900 a nest of this species was located in a dead cottonwood tree which stood in an open pasture. The nest was a burrow fifteen inches deep with a perfectly circular entrance about forty feet above the ground. A set of five eggs was taken from it on April 24. The entrance being small it was found necessary to cut it larger so as to admit my hand. Twenty-three days later the same nest contained a second set of five eggs, slightly incubated. The enlarging of the entrance evidently had no ill effect except for the fact that the burrow had been deepened several inches, probably to prevent an extra amount of light on the floor of the nest. These birds seem to gauge the depth of their excavations more by the amount of light admitted than from any instinct to dig a certain distance. For example, burrows that had their entrance just below a limb or were situated in shady woods were noticed, as a rule, to be shallower than those located in exposed fields or on the sunny side of the tree.
Bayard H. Christy (1931) describes a nest found in Pennsylvania as follows: