I was at Fort Zachary Taylor, hiding in the afternoon shade of the canopy, near the blacksmith’s shop, when I had a clear look at something you don’t see very often – the red belly of a red-bellied woodpecker.
You’d think it was something you would see often, considering it’s the lead part of its name, but no. Partly this is because most often when you see them they are clinging to the bark of a tree and you see their back and their sides, not their underside. Partly this is because when you see something described as red you think of a solid color, and on those rare occasions you do see the red-belly’s belly it doesn’t look so much like feathers that are red so much as white feathers on which someone has thoughtlessly spilled the juice from a maraschino cherry jar.
Most people, when they see a red-belly for the first time, if they haven’t noted the coloring of a lot of other woodpecker species, want to know why it isn’t called the red-headed woodpecker, because the more notable thing about them is both males and females have a glossy red crown, which could also be described as a glossy red mullet. (On the males it runs from the bridge of the beak to the nape of the neck; on the females there is a gap between the bridge patch and the nape patch, coming off a little more like a balding man with a mullet.)
A different species called the red-headed woodpecker has a full-on red cowl of a head. And most of the 26 species of woodpeckers in North America have red on the head. Most of the species in the world do, too.
Birds are less often named for their most prominent feature than they are named for the physical attribute that sets them apart from other closely related species.
I wondered if the red-bellies had ever had another name. Turns out the species has been called the red-bellied wood-pecker since the ornithologist and bird artist Mark Catesby first described the species to science in 1729, though he did put a hyphen in woodpecker.
The name woodpecker, of course, comes from the fact that they are the original headbangers. They make their living by hammering the part of their body that holds their brain into the bark of a tree several thousand times a day. It used to be theorized that the reason woodpeckers did not get brain damage was that their bill and skull functioned like a shock absorber. But if that were the case you would see compression – changes in the distance between, say, the nostril and the eye – when the bird face-butted a tree. And high-resolution, high-speed videography shows that not to be the case.
Your average woodpecker can strike with a force 20 to 30 times their body weight. Absorbing the impact would diminish all that power. Instead they channel that energy through their body like a hammer via the rigidity of their bones and muscles.
They don’t get brain damage because their brains are smaller and lighter than those of humans and primates, who would definitely get repeatedly concussed if they hit that hard.
Woodpeckers have zygodactyl feet, something I feel compelled to mention any time I write or talk about them because I learned how to both spell and pronounce it, and I went to all that effort. But their zygodactyl feet are also where the base of their power comes from. Two toes point up and two toes point down, allowing them to have a very firm grip on the bark when they strike.
Other physiological attributes include their tail feathers, which are stiff and which they use to push on the tree and curl their body forward with even more force. Their entire musculature is fine-tuned for this, including a set of hip flexors that they activate when they want to strike something extra hard.
The most recent discovery about how woodpeckers do what they do is that they actually time their breathing and give off little grunts, like tennis players, when they strike, granting them even more power.
Of course woodpeckers don’t bang their heads into trees for the fun of it. (If they want to bang their heads into something for fun, they usually go for metal poles or aluminum siding, things that amplify the sound.) They bang their heads into trees to root out the bugs, grubs and beetles that make up most of their diet. Also to excavate nest holes.
The reason I got to see the belly of the red-belly at Fort Zach was that he was foraging for reddish-green berries in a gumbo limbo tree and was hopping around through a series of thin, somewhat open branches.
I was happy about my small encounter with this woodpecker not only because I didn’t just get to see the belly and even managed to get a few pictures of it, but also because I feel like I don’t see red-bellies as often as I used to. This may be due to the fact that we used to live in a house with a dying mango tree in the yard, and woodpeckers like dying and dead trees best of all, so I saw them almost daily. Now we live in a house with a very healthy mahogany tree, which does not seem to be as attractive to them.
The one thing I think might be contributing to a slight decline in their population here is that they really like to nest in dead palm trees, especially coconut palms. Key West is a much more landscaped place than it used to be, and dead palm trees are generally not part of the plan.
But even if we have a smaller population in Key West than we used to – which again may just be personal perception – it’s not a big deal. Red-bellied woodpeckers, whose range is essentially the eastern half of the U.S., are one of the few songbird species that are increasing in population. They are considered a “species of least concern” by the International Union of Concerned Naturalists. Which doesn’t preclude a little dopamine hit any time you see one.
