The flicker explores the ground, often scratching away leaves or rubbish, to locate the ant nests, digs into the nest with its long bill, and, as the ants come pouring out, it laps them up in quantities or inserts its long, sticky tongue deep down into the nest to get the young and eggs. Early in spring it digs into the large mounds of the mound-building ants, while the ants are less active, or tears open some rotten stump to uncover a nest. Only a few days ago, I dug into an old apple-tree stump for some rotten wood to put on some of my wildflowers and uncovered a large nest of ants; within a very few minutes my pair of flickers were on the job cleaning up the ants and their pupae.
Other insect food of the flicker includes a variety of beetles, wasps, grasshoppers, crickets, mole crickets, chinch bugs, wood lice, caterpillars, grubs, and various flying insects, which it sometimes catches on the wing, darting after them like a flycatcher (Burns, 1900).
According to Beal (1911), 39.08 percent of its food is vegetable matter. Most of this consists of wild fruits and berries, such as the berries of the dogwood (Cornus) and Virginia creeper, hackberries, blueberries, huckleberries, pokeberries, serviceberries (Amelanchier), elderberries, barberries, mulberries, blackberries, wild grapes, wild black cherries, choke cherries, cultivated cherries, and the berries of the black alder, sour gum, black gum, greenbrier (Smilax), spicebush (Benzoin), red cedar, hawthorn, mountain ash, and woodbine. Harold H. Bailey (1913) says that while the fall migration is at its height in Virginia, about October first, “they are particularly fond of the blue berry of the black-gum tree, and after once finding a tree with fruit, will continue to come to it until every berry is gone, even though continually shot at. I remember a case a few years back, when a local gunner killed fifty-seven flickers from one black-gum tree in one forenoon. After the gumberries are gone, they take to the dogwood berry for their main article of food, a fine red berry and always plentiful in Tidewater.”
The flicker feeds freely on the seeds of the poison ivy and poison sumac and perhaps does some harm in distributing the seeds of these noxious plants. Professor Beal (1895) also includes the seeds of other sumacs, clover, grasses, pigweed, mullein, ragweed, and other unidentified seeds, and the seeds of the magnolia and knotweed. Mr. Burns (1900) adds wild strawberries, dewberries, raspberries, and wild plums, also acorns, beechnuts, corn from shocks, and oats, wheat, and rye from stacks.
The birds that Miss Sherman (1910) watched in their nesting box ate considerable sawdust. “That at one time the male ate three tablespoonfuls is deemed a modest estimate. An attempt to measure the amount both ate by a fresh supply daily showed the consumption of three or more handfuls. The sawdust came from sugar maple, white and red oak wood.” She seemed to think that flickers have “little use for water,” having seen them drink only twice, during many hours of watching from a blind, “all of which taken together would amount to weeks.” Owen Durfee speaks in his notes of having seen three flickers drinking, or eating, snow on a cold day in winter; he saw one drop down onto a patch of snow on a stone wall and begin eating the snow. “His motions were just like a chicken drinking water—the partly closed bill was dipped into the snow and then held up in the air and the mandibles worked as though chewing or dissolving it, when another dip would be made. Soon two other flickers flew down in the same manner and secured some snow water. On approaching, I found the footprints and several little round holes somewhat smaller than a pencil.”
I have often seen them drinking water and so have other observers; perhaps they drink copiously but not often.
Francis H. Allen says in his notes: “I have seen one feeding in the manner of a chickadee among the twigs of a tree, perching crosswise of the twig and flitting about actively, gleaning some minute food. Mr. Brewster told me that he had seen a flicker feeding this way.”
Joseph J. Hickey tells me that he has seen a flicker feeding after the manner of an Arctic three-toed woodpecker, deliberately scaling off the bark in search for food; this bird had denuded about half the bark of a hemlock.
Behavior.—In ordinary short flights, the flicker proclaims its relationship to the other woodpeckers by its rhythmic bounding flight, the wings beating more rapidly on the rises and much less so on the dips, which are usually followed by a short sail on motionless wings. Mr. Burns (1900) noted that the dips occur about every 15 or 20 feet and that the bird drops about 3 feet on each dip. On more prolonged flights the flight is steadier, more direct, strong, and fairly swift. It does not ordinarily fly at any great height, except when migrating. When alighting on a tree trunk, there is a graceful upward glide, the trunk is grasped with the feet, and the tail is used as a prop in true woodpecker fashion; but the flicker is more apt to alight on a horizontal branch than other woodpeckers, when there is less upward glide and an upright posture is assumed, as balance is acquired.
On the ground, the flicker proceeds slowly by short hops, but sometimes it runs rapidly for a few steps and then stops; it seems content to confine its foraging to a rather limited area and does not appear very active.