Audubon (1842) says: “About the middle of April it begins to form its nest, shewing little care as to the kind of tree it selects for the purpose, although it generally chooses a sound one, sometimes, however, taking one that is partially decayed. The pair work together for several days before the hole is completed, sometimes perhaps a whole week, as they dig it to a depth of a foot or sixteen inches. The direction is sometimes perpendicularly downwards from the commencement, sometimes transverse to the tree for four or five inches, and then longitudinal. The hole is rendered smooth and conveniently large throughout, the entrance being perfectly round, and just large enough to admit one bird at a time.”
A. Dawes DuBois (MS.) writes that the male bird of a pair was caught in a nest 6 feet from the ground, evidently incubating the six eggs well advanced in development. This observation is in accord with the general belief that the male takes his share in incubation.
Mrs. Alice Hall Walter (1912) states that “in the North, only one brood is raised during a season; but it is not uncommon in the South for one brood to be raised in May and a second in August.”
Eggs.—[Author’s note: The northern downy woodpecker lays ordinarily four or five eggs, though sets of three or six are not rare, and as many as seven or even eight eggs have been found in a nest. The eggs are pure white, either dull white or more or less glossy, and they vary in shape from ovate to rounded-ovate. The measurements of 55 eggs average 19.35 by 15.05 millimeters; the eggs showing the four extremes measure 22.35 by 16.26, 17.78 by 14.73, and 18.80 by 13.97 millimeters.]
Young.—The incubation period of the downy woodpecker is 12 days, according to Frank L. Burns (1915) and Dr. Arthur A. Allen (1928).
Whether in their earliest days the young birds, hidden in the depths of their dark chamber, are fed by regurgitation has not been determined, but very soon after they leave the egg food is brought directly to them. Dr. Allen (MS.) says: “Certainly by the time the young are four or five days old entire insects are brought in the parents’ bills and given to the young; I have photographic proof of this.”
Craig S. Thoms (1927), in a study of the nesting habits in South Dakota, says: “On June 9 the young were beginning to come up to the door of their excavation to receive food. Presumably the largest and strongest sticks his head clear out. When he fed he subsided and the next came up, but not quite so far. He in his turn subsided and the parent entered to feed the weaker ones still farther down. * * *
“On June 12 the last of the young left the nest, which upon being measured was found to be 10 inches deep.”
A. Dawes DuBois (MS.) tells of the flight of the young birds from the nest: “The young chattered most of the time during the last two days of nest life. One at a time they looked out a great deal at the strange outer world. They left the nest on June 11. The last two, a male and a female, left during the afternoon, each after being fed at the entrance and seeing the parent fly away. The young male flew from the nest hole straight to a tree 60 feet away. His sister quickly followed, lighting on the trunk of the same tree and following her parent up the hole in the hitching manner of their kind as though she had been practicing this vertical locomotion all her life.”
Plumages.—[Author’s note: Young downy woodpeckers are hatched naked and blind, but the juvenal plumage is acquired before the young leave the nest. In this first plumage, the young male is much like the adult male, except that the red nuchal patch is lacking; the forehead is black, spotted with white, but the crown and occiput are more or less marked with various shades of red, pinkish, or yellowish, as well as spotted with white; the black portions of the plumage are duller than in the adult; the sides of the breast are streaked and the flanks obscurely spotted with dusky; the white areas, underparts, and white spots elsewhere, as well as the rectrices, are tinged with yellowish.