Dennis - thanks for the response, I was hoping I'd hear from somebody who
does have the opportunity to disembowel woodpeckers once in a while.
Ants... it figures. That's the one thing that seemed to be present in
abnormal abundance in the terrain in which the birds were foraging. And
presumably the shallow litter on the relatively hard surface of the
roadside made the ants much easier to get at than on the floor of the
forest proper. I love it when bits of a biological jigsaw-puzzle come
together. Flickers eat ants, and are notorious ground-feeders... and
you've seen Downy Woodpeckers eat ants that were unusually accessible to
them on a sapling... so why not other woodpeckers, and on the ground, if
only occasionally?

James West

On Fri, 1 Sep 1995, Dennis Paulson wrote:

> James West wrote:
>
> "The seven birds grazing on the Orcas Island roadside with
> eight Robins were Hairy Woodpeckers. The two relatives grazing further
> down the road without any other company were Pileated Woodpeckers. I
> couldn't figure out what they were all eating so intently that day. I
> poked around in the forest litter on the roadside - it contained a variety
> of tree seeds, a lot of ants (recent big hatching?), and some
> caterpillars, but short of disemboweling a woodpecker I couldn't tell
> even whether they were eating vegetable or animal matter."
>
>
> Well, James, I would never have guessed (that's why I didn't try), but I
> might be able to reduce your puzzlement. We prepare a lot of birds here,
> and we often look in their stomachs. One of the most common things we find
> in woodpecker stomachs is.....drum roll for suspense......ANTS. I always
> knew flickers were ant specialists, but I had no idea they were such
> important food for woodpeckers in general.
>
> I've got a hummingbird feeder on a sapling in the back yard, and a stream
> of little ants comes up from the base of it to sample the "nectar." On
> occasion, probably every day, a Downy Woodpecker lands on the <1" diameter
> trunk and slurps up those ants as they move past it one by one. An
> ecosystem in a yard!
>
> Dennis Paulson, Director phone: (206) 756-3798
> Slater Museum of Natural History fax: (206) 756-3352
> University of Puget Sound e-mail: dpaulson at ups.edu
> Tacoma, WA 98416
>
>
>