Black-backed Woodpecker (Picoides arcticus)

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Black-backed Woodpecker (Picoides arcticus)

Photo credit: Dr. Lloyd Glenn Ingles
© 1999 California Academy of Sciences

Length: 9 in.
Habitat: Boreal forests of firs and spruces. Favors areas of dead or dying conifers, and may concentrate at burned or flooded areas with many standing dead trees. Also in undamaged forests of pine, Douglas-fir, hemlock, tamarack, and spruce, especially spruce bogs. Frequents lowlands in north, mountains in West.
Range: Alaska and Canada to the northernmost United States and to the mountains of California in the West.

This species and the Three-toed Woodpecker are the most northerly of the family. Both are rather tame. The Black-backed, found only in North America, is the more southerly of the two. It is also somewhat numerous, but these birds are not generally common.

The Black-backed Woodpecker's diet consists mostly of insects. It feeds mainly on larvae of wood-boring beetles; also eats other insects, spiders, some fruits and the bark of dead trees, searching for insects. Also gleens insects from bark of live trees, rarely catches insects in flight. Both parents feed nestlings.

Conservation Status The Black-backed Woodpecker population seems more or less stable.