Bird of the Month: Northern Flicker
Written by Andy McCormick
Andy McCormick, Volunteer and Former Board President of Eastside Audubon
A common, large woodpecker, the Northern Flicker is seen throughout North America.
The range of the Northern Flicker encompasses virtually all of North America below the tree line. It is an attractive bird with a large black crescent above a buffy chest and belly covered with black spotting. It makes its presence known with a variety of calls, the most frequent is a piercing kee-yer, typically delivered from a perch. Interacting birds will display using a slow wicka-wicka-wicka call. As it flies it shows off a large white rump patch. It is unmistakable and often one of the first birds learned by new birders. Photos, videos, and vocalizations of the Northern Flicker can be found at the Macaulay Library.
TWO GROUPS AND HYBRIDS
“Red-shafted” and “yellow-shafted” forms of the flicker were once considered separate species and can be identified as such quite readily. The red form has a brown cap and gray face, red feather shafts, and reddish wing linings. The yellow form has a gray cap and brown face, yellow feather shafts, and yellow wing linings. The red-shafted male has a red malar (moustache) stripe and no red on the nape. The yellow-shafted male has a black malar stripe and a red crescent on the nape. The females have no red markings; otherwise, the sexes are similar.
A large zone of hybridization of these two forms of Northern Flicker extends from northeastern New Mexico and the Texas panhandle through the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains north to Alberta, British Columbia, and southeastern Alaska (Alderfer). Intergrades are common and show a spectrum of features from each form. These intergrades are seen more frequently in winter as flickers migrate to warmer areas.
Northern Flicker
Scientific Name: Colaptes auratus
Length: 12.5”
Wingspan: 20”
Weight: 4.6 lb (130 g)
AOU Alpha Code: NOFL
ANT EATER AND CAVITY NESTER
Flickers are omnivores with a heavy emphasis on eating ants. They will also feed on termites, beetles, and other insects. In winter, they consume berries, and some nuts and seeds (Kaufman). They also readily come to bird feeders where they prefer suet and sunflower seeds. Most often, flickers forage by poking into the ground for insects. They will even explore the cracks in concrete sidewalks and leave clumps of turf strewn behind them.
Both male and female cooperate in excavating a nest hole in soft wood trees such as aspens. Egg laying begins shortly after completion of the nest hole with one egg being deposited each morning. The young hatch after a two-week incubation period and fledge after about four more weeks. They then follow parents to good foraging locations (Kaufman).
The number of eggs can range from three to a dozen. If an egg is lost or removed, it is replaced, sometimes indefinitely. One experiment in which a researcher removed one egg from a nest on a daily basis resulted in 71 eggs being replaced (Wiebe and Moore). Males will remove fecal sacs and deposit them up to 100 meters from the nest.
CONSERVATION AND MANAGEMENT
Northern Flickers remain abundant across their range and their current post-breeding population is close to 10,000,000 individuals (Wiebe and Moore). However, there has been a steady decrease of about 1% per year in the flicker population based on Breeding Bird Survey data gathered between 1966 and 2015 (Wiebe and Moore). Causes of this decline are not confirmed but removal of dead and dying trees and snags destroys suitable nesting sites, and pesticide spraying for agriculture or suburban use threatens a major food source for flickers. Since Northern Flicker is not recognized as a threatened species, there are no management programs in place.
A NOTE ON FLICKER TAXONOMY
Colaptes is the genus for 13 woodpeckers in the Americas including the Northern and Gilded (C. chrysoides) Flickers of North America (Winkler, et al. Birds of the World). The name is a Latinized version of the Greek, kolapter, meaning to peck as a bird, to carve, or to chisel (Holloway). The species name auratus is Latin for gilded, or overlain with gold, initially referring to the yellow on the underside of the wings of the Yellow-shafted Flicker (C. a. auratus), which was considered a separate species before it and the Red-shafted Flicker (C. a. cafer) were lumped as the Northern Flicker in 1973. (The third epithet in the scientific name is for the subspecies.)
In 1995, the Gilded Flicker was separated from Northern Flicker “on the basis of limited interbreeding, habitat divergence, and differences in life history” (Moore, Pyle, and Wiebe). Gilded Flicker is well-adapted to the desert, whereas Northern Flicker is a forest bird. However, phylogenic (evolutionary) research in 2016 found that the Gilded Flicker may be an evolutionary sister to the former Yellow-shafted Flicker, and the former Red-shafted Flicker may be ancestral to both, potentially making the Gilded Flicker closer to Yellow-shafted Flicker than the Yellow-shafted Flicker is to the Red-shafted Flicker, implying that the Gilded Flicker may not be considered a separate species. Further study is needed to sort out our knowledge of these unsettled relationships.
Photo credit Mick Thompson. References available upon request from amccormick@eastsideaudubon.org.