The Science of Birds - The Northern Flicker

Episode Date: April 5, 2026

👕 Bird Merch —  Get yourself some bird shirts!~~~In Episode 131 of The Science of Birds, host Ivan Phillipsen takes a deep dive into one of North America's most familiar woodpeckers: the Northern Flicker (Colaptes auratus). Found year-round across the continent, this bird has a habit of making itself known in some startling ways, including drumming loudly on rooftops at the crack of dawn.The episode describes the flicker's appearance, from its bold spotted plumage and signature white rump patch to the mustache-like malar stripe that sets males apart. It also covers the bird's surprisingly un-woodpecker-like lifestyle—spending most of its time hopping on the ground in pursuit of ants—and the full range of sounds it uses to communicate, from the mechanical "long call" to the rhythmic "wicka call" used in courtship and territorial disputes.The episode gets into the centuries-old debate over whether the yellow-shafted and red-shafted forms should be considered separate species, the remarkable hybrid zone stretching across the Great Plains, and what recent genomic research has revealed about the genetics behind their different color forms. Also covered are the flicker's breeding behavior, diet, and its ecological role as a keystone species.Despite being one of the most recognizable birds in North American backyards, flicker populations have declined by nearly 50% since 1966 — a sobering reminder that even familiar species need our attention. Tune in to learn all about this loud, lovable, ant-obsessed bird.Links of InterestNorthern Flicker drumming on metal roof [VIDEO]Pair of flickers doing the "Wicka Dance" [VIDEO]Wild Latitudes: Worldwide birding and nature tours.Link to this episode on the Science of Birds websiteSupport the show

Let's say you've put in a long day at work or school, and now you're home and ready to relax for a quiet evening. You flop down on the couch with a cup of hot tea, get comfortable, and open up the latest novel you've been reading. Just as you get immersed in your book, you're startled by this jarring sound. You almost spill your tea. The sound, which seems to be coming from somewhere just over your head, instantly got your adrenaline pumping. What the heck is that? You might think the most obvious, most parsimonious explanation would be that you've got yourself a poltergeist, or perhaps some gremlins are using a pneumatic drill in your attic.

But if we can assume that you live in North America, I can tell you with some confidence that your poltergeist is actually a bird, a northern flicker, to be exact. The bird is up on your roof where it was pleased to find a piece of resonant metal like on your chimney or gutter. The northern flicker is a species of woodpecker. This one is drumming with its beak on that piece of metal. The bird is trying to communicate with other flickers in the surrounding area. Because it seems your roof is now part of this one's territory and it wants everyone in the neighborhood to know about it. Hello and welcome. This is the Science of Birds.

I am your host, Ivan Philipson. The Science of Birds podcast is a lighthearted exploration of bird biology for lifelong learners. This episode, which is number 131, is all about Calaptis Oratus, the Northern Flickr. This species is one of the most familiar woodpeckers, and one of the most familiar birds, in North America. It's found year-round across the lower 48 in the United States, in forests, farmlands, and suburban backyards. Looking at observation data on the I-Naturalist website, you can see that among all the woodpecker species in North America, the northern flicker is ranked number two in terms of total observations. It's second only to the Downey Woodpecker. As I'm

recording this episode, it's March, so early spring in the Northern Hemisphere. This is the time of year when Northern Flickers get more conspicuous. They're out there getting all ramped up for the breeding season, making a lot of vocalizations and banging on a lot of roofs. I had to smile because more than once, I heard a Flickr calling outside as I was working on the script for this podcast episode. So I invite you to join me on a deep dive into the life of the wonderful Northern Flickr. Sure, it's a well-known, familiar species, but I bet you'll learn something new about it in today's episode. We'll kick things off by looking at the Northern Flickers' appearance, as well as some of its general behavioral traits and the sounds it makes. This is a medium, large-ish woodpecker with a sturdy body and broad, rounded wings.

The upper chest, the breast area, can sort of stick out, like the bird is full of pride puffing out its chest. The tail is wedge-shaped, and like most woodpeckers, it has stiffened tail feathers, erectrices that serve as a support brace when the bird is clinging to a vertical tree trunk. The body length, from beak to tail, is about 11 to 14 inches or 28 to 36 centimeters. and its wingspan is between 16 and 21 inches or 42 to 54 centimeters. The Northern Flickr has multiple subspecies and size varies a bit among them. The red shafted subspecies is the largest, while the subspecies known as the Cuban Flickr is generally the smallest. But there's also a trend within each subspecies, or at least some of them,

where body size and bill length increase as you look at least. at populations further and further north. Biologists call this pattern clinal variation, so there's a latitudinal cline in body size. For example, within the yellow shafted flicker subspecies, there's an increase in average size from south to north. Likewise, red shafted flickers in Central British Columbia, Canada, are significantly larger than red shafted individuals in the central United States. The Northern Flickr has a powerful, slightly curved bill that it uses for probing in the dirt and for hammering into wood, or hammering on your roof when all you want is a moment of peace for crying out loud. The bill is 0.9 to 1.7 inches or 2.2 to 4.3 centimeters long. In adults,

the bill color ranges from black to brownish black or maybe grayish during the breeding season. Now let's look at the plumage. Overall, this is a good-looking bird. The upper parts are grayish-brown with dark brown or blackish bars. The bird's underparts are off-white with numerous black spots and a prominent black crescent-shaped patch on the breast. And there's often a buff-colored sort of wash overlying the white underparts. Depending on which subspecies you're looking at, the flight feathers in the wing and tail are either bright yellow or a salmon-colored red.

This color is seen in the barbs and the shaft of the feather, and the shaft is known as the rakis, right? R-A-C-H-I-S. So that's why the two major subspecies are called the yellow-shafted and red-shafted flickers. because yellow-raichist and red-raichist flicker don't quite roll off the tongue, do they? Males are distinguished by having a patch of feathers below the cheek, extending down from the base of the bill. This is the mallor stripe. It's black in the yellow-shafted subspecies and red in the red-shafted subspecies. Got that?

The mallor-stripe is black in the yellow-shafted birds and red in the red-shafted birds. and the maller stripe looks sort of like a mustache, and you don't see it on the females. So this is the primary way to tell males apart from females. The mallor stripe is the best mark of sexual dichromatism in this species. And the male flickers mallor stripe looks, to me, sort of like Hulk Hogan's mustache. Or like the horseshoe mustache on that leather-clad biker guy in the village people. Well, I guess that's the case for the yellow-shafted subspecies anyway, because it has a black mustache, right? Anyway, the red-shafted birds, both males and females, have gray faces,

while the yellow-shafted individuals have pinkish-tan faces. And the yellow-shafted birds have a small red nuchel patch. Neuchel is spelled N-U-C-H-A-L, and it refers to the nape of the neck. The red nukele patch is also present in two other subspecies, the Cuban and Grand Cayman Flickers. This striking plumage difference between the red and yellow-shafted flicker subspecies is one of the most interesting things about the northern flicker, and we'll circle back to talk more about it later. Ornithologists think that the flicker's plumage might serve as a social signal for health and vigor. The red and yellow colors in the feathers come from carotenoid pigments in the flicker's diet.

Remember that we talked about carotenoids a lot in episode 56 of the podcast, which is titled How Bird Feathers Get Their Colors. Research shows that flicker nestlings with a higher body mass tend to have more intense carotenoid pigment saturation in their feathers, in their flight feathers. And healthy male nestlings with stronger immune responses show greater color intensity in their feathers as well. And then we have the other pigment, melanin.

This is the source of black, gray, and brown colors in birds. In northern flickers, the size of the black breast spots in nestlings is positively correlated with body mass. And in adult birds, the blackness of that chest bib and the width of the terminal tail band increase with age and may serve as cues for mate quality. And yeah, the tips of the tail feathers are black. I didn't mention that earlier. Sometimes an individual in eastern North America has some reddish feathers. And you might ask, what's the big deal with that? Well, the thing is, the yellow-shafted subspecies is the one found in the eastern part of the continent.

So you shouldn't find any red feathers in those birds, unless, of course, it happens to be a rare vagrant. Listen to the last episode I did if you want to learn all about vagrancy in birds. Anyway, when a flicker with some red-colored feathers shows up in the east, people used to guess that it was a vagrant or some kind of hybrid. But there's a third option, one that might be much more common. When these birds eat the berries of an invasive plant called bush honeysuckle, a red carotenoid pigment called rhodozoanthin from the honeysuckle's fruit gets into the growing feathers of the flicker. And that can cause a yellow-shafted bird to grow bright red feathers in its wings or tail, making it look like a hybrid even if its parents were both pure yellow-shafted birds.

Mystery solved, yo! One more key feature of the Northern Flickers plumage is its highly conspicuous white rump patch. This is a signature field mark that you can't miss when the bird is in flight. Remember that the rump is the area on the bird's upper side just above the base of the tail. Now, a couple notes about general behavior. Despite them making all that drumming racket and having a tough guy biker mustache, Northern Flickers are little scaredy cats, or scaredy birds, I guess. They're timid and they spook easily.

At least that's my impression of how they act around humans. They crack me up, like there'll be a flicker hopping around on the railing of my backyard deck. I can quietly observe it looking out the window. But the second I try to open the door and go outside, that bird is like, Yikes, and it jets. It flaps off into the forest with great haste, showing me its trademark white rump patch as it goes. The patch is like a bumper sticker that says, If you can read this, you're too close.

So the Northern Flickr is what I think of as a species that spooks or flushes easily. Like, if there's one nearby and you even think about it, That bird is out of there, man. And I've wondered why it shows this behavior. It probably has to do with its lifestyle. Unlike most woodpeckers that stay safe up in trees, Flickers spend much of their time searching for ants on the ground. So that makes them highly exposed and vulnerable to predators,

like hawks, foxes, and bobcats. To survive, the Northern Flickr has developed a flight over fight strategy. At the first sign of danger, it immediately flies to a nearby tree for safety rather than trying to confront the threat. This ground-dwelling lifestyle also explains why the upper parts of the Northern Flickr are all brown and gray and barred. This plumage coloration and patterning provides some camouflage, its cryptic coloration. Another behavioral trait is the way a Northern Flickr flies. Its flight pattern is strongly undulating, resembling a roller coaster with bursts of flapping followed by a pause. So it rises up and falls down in this undulating pattern. This might help you identify a northern flicker in

flight, even if it's pretty far away. Now that said, undulating flight is common to many other woodpeckers, so just keep that in mind. Now let's talk about the sounds that flickers make, both vocal and non-vocal. Despite their shyness, these are talkative, noisy birds, especially in the spring. Northern Flickers have several distinct vocal sounds. First off, there's the long call.

This is a loud, sustained series of kick-kick-kick notes. It's so loud that it can be heard from over a half a mile or a kilometer away. So here's an example of the long call. Now there's some similarity between this long call and the call of another bird, the pilliated woodpecker. Both species can be found in some of the same habitats. Listen to this pillated woodpecker.

And here again is the long call of the northern flicker. So here are some tips on how to tell the call of the northern flicker from the pilliated woodpecker. Maybe this isn't a challenge for you, but it has been for me at times. So here we go. The Flickers' long call is really steady and mechanical. That rhythmic series of wick, wick, wick, or kek, kek, notes

stays at a constant speed from start to finish, like a machine. In the pilliated woodpecker, the call is much more irregular and kind of wild. It often starts slightly slower, speeds up, and then tapers off, giving it a galloping or maniacal quality. It sounds less like a machine and more like a junker. If the call ends abruptly while maintaining its tempo, it's likely a flicker. If the call seems to unravel or slow down and drop in pitch as it finishes, you're likely hearing a pilliated woodpecker. Next up, we have another familiar vocal sound from the flicker, the Pia call, P-E-A-H, also called the

clear call. This is a single descending note. It's often repeated at longer space, intervals. And again, this is a loud sound. The Pia or Clear Call is used to maintain contact between mates. So here's an example of a bird making this Pia or Clear call from its nest hole in South Dakota. Then we have the Wicca call. This one is complex and variable. It consists of a rhythmic sequence featuring two alternating notes, as in Wicca. It's typically made during ritualized social interactions between two birds. The following recording has both the Pia-S-Clear call and the Wicca call. See if you can distinguish the two. Now I've got one more vocal sound for you to listen to. This one is the W-H-U-R-D-L-E. This one is made during interactions between flickers.

So those were the primary vocal sounds of the flicker. Then we have drumming, which is a non-volveau. local sound. Like the rooftop shenanigans we heard in the intro, a flicker's drumming typically lasts for about one second and contains around 25 beats. The main purpose of drumming is to defend the bird's nesting territory. It's a key way for a flicker to announce its presence to rivals, specifically in guarding the area immediately around the nest site. Now, both male and female flickers participate in drumming, but the males tend to do it more often, especially during the spring. Here's an example of drumming. And finally, I'll put a link in the show notes to a video of a Northern Flickr drumming gleefully on someone's roof. Now it's time to dig into the origin of this

bird's common and scientific names. If Calaptis Oratus is a woodpecker, why don't we call it a northern woodpecker? Where did the name Flickr come from? Is it because of the wika-wika-cull that someone thought sounded more like flicker-flicker, or flicka-flicker? Or maybe it's because of the flickering red or yellow color in the wings of the bird as it flies. Or maybe from the way it flicks its tail feathers? And then there's the bird's long tongue, which flicks in and out when the woodpecker is foraging for ants on the ground.

Any of these could be true, because it turns out we just don't know. Nobody seems to know where the common name Flickr came from. If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you probably know that I like to geek out every so often on the origins and evolution of words and names, on the subject of etymology. Well, how about this? There's a fun etymological history for the word flicker.

The verb flicker originated in old English as the word Flickorian, meaning to flutter or to flap quickly and lightly. And Flickorian was mostly used to describe bird movements. It's an automotopeic word. The way it sounds suggests quick, repeated, or light movements. Flickorian became Flickr, and it later transitioned to describe any small quick movements, not just of birds, and to describe wavering light, like a flickering candle flame.

But hundreds of years later, the word flicking, Flickr made a complete circle, connecting back to its avian origins when someone decided to name this North American woodpecker a flicker. Anyway, this species has had many common names in North America. In fact, my understanding is that no other bird on this continent has had as many colloquial or folk names as the Flickr. These names include, for real, cotton rump, pigeon woodpecker, high hole, crescent bird, Shad, Spirit, Gafflewoodpecker, and Yellowhammer.

That's what people in Alabama call it, and that is actually their state bird. The state bird of Alabama is the northern flicker, the yellow hammer. Now, since it seems like we're allowed to call this bird whatever we want, I've got some suggestions. We could call it the unwelcome roofbanger. Or how about the nervous Nelly bird, the flying ant eater, or the moustachioed grasspecker? I don't know, just some ideas. All right, let's move on to the scientific name now, Colaptis Oratus.

The genus name, Calaptis, spelled C-O-L-A-P-T-E-S, comes from ancient Greek, and it means a chisler. And that makes sense, since flickers excavate, they chisel out holes in trees. They're chiselers.

Not to be confused with Twizzlers, the licorish-like candy, that is, in my opinion, a poor man's version of red vines. But the deeper root of colaptis is the ancient Greek word colapto, meaning to chisel, to peck, or to strike. Then we have the second part of the scientific name, the specific epithet, Aratus, spelled A-U-R-A-T-U-S. That too comes from Greek,

and it means gilded or ornamented with gold. You know, like the grilled, of Flavor-Flave or Lil Wayne. Now, I've been talking about the yellow shafted flicker and the red-shafted flicker. These are, as I've said, two distinct subspecies within the species,

Collaptis Auretus. They look different, and they have largely separate geographic ranges, east and west, respectively. But once upon a time, ornithologists treated the birds in these two groups as separate species. Calapti's Auretus was the name for the yellow-shafted flicker, and Calapti's Cafer, C-A-F-E-R, was the red-shafted.

And this classification lasted from the 1800s all the way up to 1972. Then in 1973, the yellow-shafted and red-shafted flickers were lumped together as a single species, the northern flicker. But wait, there's more. Because there had been a third species, the gills. the gilded flicker, Calaptis, Chrysoides. That one lives in the Sonoran desert in the southwest. Well, during Lumpfest 1973, the gilded flicker also got thrown in with the northern flicker. So three species were lumped into one. The decision to lump these birds was driven by the biological

species concept, which prioritizes reproductive isolation. For two-pies, populations to be considered species, they have to be reproductively isolated. Research had shown that, at least for the yellow and red-shafted populations, they interbreed so freely that there's a massive hybrid zone in the Great Plains, from Texas to Alaska. Because there didn't seem to be any significant barrier to gene flow and the hybrids between these groups were fertile and successful, ornithologists concluded they were two ends of a single highly variable species, rather than two distinct evolutionary lineages. If you want to learn more about the biological species concept and how bird species are defined,

you can check out episode 15 of this podcast. It's titled, What is a Species, really? So, ever since 1973, the Northern Flickr has been a single species. However, some ornithologists still argue that because the hybrid zone is relatively non-examination, narrow and stable, the yellow and red-shafted subspecies could potentially be split into two species again under the phylogenetic species concept. So I just wanted to point out that there's some ongoing debate about this. Now, if you just happen to look at the HBW and BirdLife International checklist for all the birds of the world, you might be surprised to see that it has the yellow-shafted and red-shafted flickers listed as full species.

Not because that checklist has applied the phylogenetic species concept, but instead because they've actually used something called the Tobias criteria. That's what they use to decide if something is or isn't a full species. The Tobias criteria, developed in 2010, make up a points-based quantitative scoring system. It's used to determine avian species boundaries based on phenotypic divergence. In other words, differences in appearance, behavior, and physiology. By scoring differences in plumage, morphology, and vocalizations, the Tobias criteria system is supposed to provide a transparent, consistent method

to determine if a population is a separate species or is just a subspecies. But not everyone agrees that this is the best approach. But it probably doesn't matter because the HBW BirdLife checklist is being phased out, and it's getting replaced by Avalist. You know, the one list to rule them all that just came to life last year. On Avalist, the Northern Flicker is a species, with the yellow and red-shafted populations designated as subspecies. Because the Northern Flickr is a woodpecker, it belongs to the Woodpecker family.

Can you remember the name of the woodpecker family? That's right, it's Piccadie, P-I-C-I-D-A-E. We talked all about that family in episode 11 of the podcast. So we're in the family Piccadie, and the genus is Collaptes. There are 14 other species in that genus. and of those eight have Flickr in their common English names. So we've got the Chilean Flickr, the Andean Flickr, Fernandina's Flickr, and so on. But six other species in that same genus are called woodpeckers.

Birds like the gray-crowned woodpecker, crimson-mantled woodpecker, and black-necked woodpecker. Now let's return to the gilded flicker. Remember that prior to getting lumped in 1973, it was treated as a separate species. Well, in 1995, the American Ornithologists Union agreed to split the Gilded Flicker back into being its own species, restoring Calaptis Cressoides to its former glory. This decision was based on new research that had showed that those populations in the desert southwest didn't actually hybridize all that much with flickers in the other populations. The gilded flicker is the northern flicker's closest relative.

The two species look very similar, at least superficially. However, the gilded flicker is smaller, and it possesses a blend of traits from both the yellow-shafted and red-shafted forms. It has bright yellow wing and tail feathers like the former, but a gray face and red maller stripe like the latter. There was yet another important taxonomic split that happened much more recently. In 2024, the Guatemalan Flickr was officially elevated to a full species. While it had been categorized as just a subspecies of the Northern Flickr,

ornithologists recognized its distinct status based on some significant genetic and vocal differences. The Guatemalan Flickr has a relatively small geographic range, and it's confined to Central America. The last common ancestor of the Guatemalan flicker and the northern flicker might have lived around two million years ago. Around that time, the two lineages went their separate ways, and then sometime later the gilded flicker evolved to become a distinct species. Much more recently, as in maybe the last tens of thousands of years,

the genetic evolutionary split occurred between the yellow-shafted and red-shafted subspecies of the northern flicker. They diverged and came to look different. Then as the massive continental ice sheets receded at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, it seems that these two populations came back into contact. And this is what biologists call secondary contact. That began roughly 11,000 years ago. So the two colors, the two flicker flavors, lemon and cherry, had been isolated from each other by a massive wall of ice for thousands of years. When the ice melted away, the two groups met in the Great Plains of North America,

and they greeted each other as long-lost cousins. And then they started making babies together. Making babies is not behavior we would normally recommend for cousins. This geographic region of secondary contact is now a hybrid zone. The ranges of the two subspecies overlap in the Great Plains. This area stretches from northern Texas to southern Alaska, mostly following the eastern slope and the rain shadow of the Rocky Mountains. The birds interbreed there, cranking out offspring that show a mix of both parental types,

such as orange-tinted wing and tail feathers. Yellow plus red makes orange, right? This Flickr hybrid zone has fascinated naturalists and scientists for at least 150 years, with recorded interest dating back to the mid-1800s. The zone is remarkably stable and successful because the birds don't seem to face any biological penalties for interbreeding. Unlike some other hybrid animals that might suffer from health or fertility issues, hybrid flickers are healthy and produce just as many offspring

as their pure lemon or cherry-flavored parents. Long-term field studies have shown that there's no significant difference in reproductive success, such as the number of eggs laid or the number of chicks that survive to leave the nest, regardless of whether the parents are pure or hybrids. One leading hypothesis ornithologists have to explain what's going on is called bounded hybrid superiority. This theory or hypothesis suggests that hybrids might actually be better adapted to the unique transitional environment of the Great Plains than the original parent groups. And if this is true that the hybrids are superior in this particular region,

that could be what keeps the zone from dissolving over time. But this is just an idea. The bounded hybrid superiority hypothesis is a reasonable explanation for the stability of the Northern Flickr hybrid zone. But research has mostly shown that reproductive, success is the same for both hybrids and parental types. There doesn't seem to be much evidence of the hybrids being actually superior. The Flickr Hybrid Zone was historically thought to be stationary, but research comparing data from the 1950s all the way to the 2010s has discovered

that the center of the hybrid zone has shifted about 45 miles, or 73 kilometers, to the west, toward the Rockies. This movement suggests that the yellow-shafted flickers from the east are expanding their range, possibly because of climate change or human land management. For example, irrigation and tree-planting practices have created more wooded corridors across the plains, providing the nesting trees that these birds need. Yellow-shafted and red-shafted flickers are so closely related that it took a long time before scientists could tease them apart using genetic data from DNA.

Their genomes are almost entirely identical. But with the right genetic markers and enough statistical power, the two groups can be teased apart in a genetic analysis. And this is cool. In a study from 2021, researchers were actually able to home in on the portion of the flickered genome that might be responsible for the color differences between yellow and redshift Flickers. This study identified several regions in the genome and some candidate genes that are at least

associated with specific plumage patches. So in the wing and tail, as well as the nukele patch, ear coverts, and that biker mustache, the mailer stripe. Turning now to look at the distribution and habitat of the northern flicker, this species has the largest range of any North American woodpecker. It breeds from the Arctic in Alaska and Canada. south to cover the entire lower 48 in the U.S., and then it extends down into central Mexico and the Caribbean. In terms of habitat, these birds thrive in open woodlands, savannas, and forest edges, where they can find two key habitat features, dead trees for nesting and open ground foraging. Because northern flickers feed primarily on the ground, they usually avoid thick, continuous.

forests where the heavy tree and ground cover makes it difficult to find food in the dirt. And yet this is a highly adaptable species, so we commonly find flickers in places where humans live, like city parks, farm fields that have rows of trees, and quiet residential neighborhoods. Or apparently in noisy residential neighborhoods like mine here in Portland, Oregon. The northern flicker is a keystone species in its natural habitat. As a primary cavity excavator, it creates essential nesting sites for other bird species that can't chisel out their own cavities. Now let's consider migration. If you feed on ground-dwelling insects, you might have a hard time finding food in the depths of the northern winter,

when the ground is frozen or covered in deep snow. So, some populations of northern flicker are migratory. birds in northern populations vacate Canada and the northern U.S. entirely in the winter. They head south. Meanwhile, birds in southern populations are more sedentary, they're resident. So the northern flicker is a species that we would call a partial migrant. For those northern migratory populations, the Rocky Mountains serve as a major divide. Birds breeding in the summer to the west of the Rockies spend the winter.

along the Pacific coast, while the ones that breed to the east of the Rockies migrate toward the Gulf Coast or the Southern Atlantic states in winter. So Calaptis Oratus has a vast range and it occupies a wide variety of habitats. It's a common bird. So on the conservation front, it's better off than many other bird species. And it has a status of least concern on the IUCN Red List. But And it seems like there's always a butt, right? But according to data from the North American Breeding Bird Survey, Northern Flickr populations fell by approximately 1.2% every year from 1966 to 2021, resulting in a total loss of nearly 50%.

So yeah, even though this is still a common bird, its population has decreased a lot. It's been cut in half. and the eastern yellow-shafted subspecies has been hit the hardest. The best global population size estimate that we have for this species is, as far as I know, 12 million. But since that estimate was made before 2024, it includes both northern and Guatemalan flickers. Because remember, the Guatemalan flicker was split off as its own species in 2024. So a global population of 12 million for the Northern Flickr is probably an overestimate.

The actual cause of the Northern Flickers' decline isn't fully understood, but the loss of dead trees as breeding habitat could be one thing. Humans like to get rid of dead trees. Also, we have invasive European starlings which are also cavity nesters, and they often compete with flickers for nest holes. And yet another thing, pesticides used on lawns and golf courses could also cause problems, since flickers like to forage in the short grass. And speaking of foraging, let's go ahead and talk about what and how flickers eat.

This is an insect specialist. But not just any old insect will do. As I've been alluding to, the Northern Flicker really loves ants. ants make up over 90% of its diet during the breeding season. The flicker eats adult ants, larval ants, and ant pupae. I imagine some of its favorite meals include ant pudding, ant curry, and ant enchiladas. Flickers forage primarily on the ground, and only very rarely in trees.

A flicker hops around and uses its powerful bill for probing and hammering in the soil. It can chisel its way deep into subterranean ant colonies. And as I mentioned, the northern flicker has a long, sticky, barbed tongue that can dart out up to two inches or four to five centimeters past the bill tip. It uses that tongue to slurp up ants. And that's why I've proposed the very fitting name of flying ant eater for this bird. Flickers sometimes use their bills to bust open dried cow dung. to find the hidden insects inside. It's sort of like the Northern Flickers version of a pinata.

The bird wax away at the cow pie until it rips open and a bunch of tasty treats come spilling out. Research has shown that a Flickr's choice of where to hunt for food often changes depending on the temperature. On cold mornings or early in the spring, these birds prefer open grasslands because the sun warms the ground quickly, making ants more active on the surface. But when the weather becomes very hot,

the birds switch to shady forest areas where the temperature is more comfortable and their prey is easier to find. Both of these foraging habitats might provide a flicker with just as much food because even though open grasslands are generally crawling with more ants, the forest-dwelling ant species

are approximately twice the size of the grassland ant species. This suggests that forest foraging may offer higher biomass per ant-eaten, and that could offset the lower overall ant density. Grassland, forest, it's a win-win situation, unless you're an ant, I guess. It's a lose-lose situation for the ants, but win-win for the flickers. In any case, it seems that northern flickers avoid large, aggressive ant colonies, choosing instead to focus on smaller species with small colonies.

Large colonies with aggressive ants can defend themselves by biting hard and spraying formic acid as a deterrent. Now, speaking of formic acid, there's one more thing about the relationship between flickers and ants. You might come across a flicker sitting by an ant hill on the ground with its wings spread out. If you look closely, you might be alarmed to see that there are. are ants swarming all over the bird's feathers. It might seem that the ants have gotten their revenge by working together and taking the bird down. But it's okay, relax, the flicker is doing just fine. I don't think I've actually talked much about this behavior on the podcast before. It's called anting. Even though it's especially common in flickers, hundreds of other bird species do it.

They do anting. They practice anting. They basically take a bath in a little. living swarm of ants. Now, why do birds do this? Well, there's no single universally accepted explanation. It's still a bit of a mystery. And I think anting would make a fun topic for a podcast episode, so we'll save that full discussion for another day. But one idea is that because some ants produce that formic acid, and that chemical can act as a natural insecticide or fungicide, that might help birds rid themselves of feather mites and lice. So yeah, the life of a flicker revolves around ants. But these birds also eat some things that are not ants, like other invertebrates, beetles, termites, and flies, for example. And during autumn and winter, Flickers also eat some

plant material, including berries and fruits from plants like wild cherry, bayberry, and elderberry. And Northern Flickers really like poison ivy berries. The primary dispersal mechanism for poison ivy is in fact the consumption and subsequent spreading of its seeds by birds. Birds like Flickers eat the berries, poop them out in some other spot, and the world is gifted with yet another poison ivy bush. Hooray! Northern Flickers are, when it comes to breeding, socially and genetically monogamous. That said, about 5% of the population in some regions is polyandrus. Remember that polyandry is where a single female has more than one male partner. In these situations,

a female will lay eggs for two different males in two separate nesting holes. She lays these sets of eggs one after another and remains involved with both families by sitting on the eggs and bringing food to the chicks. However, she usually spends less time sitting on the eggs at her second nest because she's simultaneously busy feeding the older babies at her first nest. This unusual and interesting behavior seems to occur when there's a shortage of females in the local environment. So if a male has been calling for a mate for several weeks in the spring and he doesn't find one, he might eventually pair up with a female who's already partnered with a neighboring male. And this system can actually work, as in both sets of chicks can survive and fledge.

And that is because Flickr males are naturally very dedicated parents. They do a lot of the heavy lifting, such as building the nest and handling most of the nighttime egg sitting. When a male does find an interested female, the two of them will engage in, courtship displays. They do a little dance together. This ritual goes by several names, the fencing duel, wika dance or wicka bout. Now, when you hear the words wika and ritual in the same sentence, you might imagine these flickers as little pagans, wearing long red robes and pentagram necklaces, holding tiny ritual daggers in their claws as they chant to invoke the four elements, or whatever.

And that would be awesome. But no, you're thinking of Wicca, W-I-C-C-A. Flickers do the W-A-W-A-C-K-A-T-A. It's called that because the two birds make their rhythmic Wic-A-W-A-W-A calls during this dance. Remember that? We heard an example of Wicca calls earlier. The dance involves the two birds facing each other. They swing their heads and bob in a figure-eight pattern while giving their calls.

while giving their calls. The birds may also flick their wings and spread their tails to show off the bright yellow or red feathers on their undersides. If you'd like to see the Wicca dance in action, I'll put a link to a YouTube video in the show notes for you. The Northern Flickers Wicca dance

is a beautiful thing to behold, at least when it's used for courtship. But this very same dance can take on a darker meaning when it's performed by two rival birds facing off in a territorial dispute. Confrontational wicka dances, or duels, can last for hours, but usually without any physical contact, without anyone getting hurt.

Both sexes aggressively defend the area immediately surrounding their nest tree. They do this with drumming, calling, and wika dances. Intense male versus male duels often escalate when a female is nearby watching, because the males are essentially showing off their vigor and their bright colors to both their rival and the potential partner. And it seems the conflict can sometimes escalate out of control. In one paper, for example, a naturalist in Colorado reported seeing two adult male red-shafted flickers engaged in a violent struggle on the pavement. One of the flickers pecked at the skull of his enemy so brutally that the latter bird actually died. Crazy.

As for the nest that gets defended by a pair of flickers, the partners use ritualized tapping on tree trunks to communicate with one another while they're looking for a nest location. They'll excavate their hole in a dead or diseased tree with a strong preference for the species quaking aspen. Both sexes help with the excavation, but as I mentioned, the male performs the majority of the work. And then we get some eggs.

Northern Flickr eggs are white and glossy. The yolk in a Flickers egg accounts for only 16% of its total size, a proportion that ranks among the very lowest ever recorded for a bird species. And why is the yolk so small in Northern Flickr eggs? Who knows? Yet another mystery. A typical clutch consists of six to eight eggs. Northern Flickers are indefinite layers, meaning that if eggs are removed from the nest, the female will continue to lay replacements.

I've talked about this before, but there was this experiment from over 100 years ago where the scientist removed the eggs from a Flickers nest every day. But one egg was always left behind in the nest to make sure the female wouldn't just give up and abandon her nest. She laid about an egg a day to refill her clutch, and she ended up laying 7,000, eggs in 73 days, which is pretty amazing. As I mentioned, the sex roles are partially reversed in the northern flicker. The male does more of the parental care early on, including all nighttime incubation and brooding.

When the eggs hatch, the baby flickers are altricial. They're naked and blind, and they have this little white egg tooth at the tips of their bills. This is supposedly a visual signal that helps the parents, locate their chicks in the dark nest cavity. The young flickers leave the nest about 24 to 27 days after hatching. They'll hang around in one spot for a while, outside the nest, waiting for mom and dad to bring them food. They often just cluster together and cling to the side of a tree.

After a few weeks, they become independent. They need to go find their own ants and find their own human roof to bang on. Compared to other woodpeckers and other birds of the similar body size, Northern Flickers have surprisingly short lives. They live fast and die young, apparently. A Flickr starts breeding in its very first year, and then females crank out offspring by laying large clutches of eggs. The maximum recorded lifespan for a Northern Flickr is nine years,

but most individuals probably don't live nearly that long. So there you have it, the northern flicker, the yellow hammer, the cotton rump, the moustachioed grasspecker, a woodpecker that doesn't act like a typical woodpecker. Sure, it has the chisel-shaped bill, the tree drumming, the excavated nest, and all of that, but then it spends most of its days hopping around on the ground, slurping up ants like a miniature ant-eater. It's a bird of contradictions. It's loud and, let's be honest, a little obnoxious sometimes, but also super skittish. It bolts for the trees at the slightest disturbance. It's a familiar, well-studied species, but some of its ways are still mysterious. One of the coolest things about the Northern Flickers

biology is that it hybridizes freely across half the continent, blurring the very boundaries of what we think of as a species. And that hybrid zone has somehow been still, stable over thousands of years. And this is a keystone species with important ecological connections to other cavity nesting birds, to the ants it eats, and to plants like poison ivy. Despite being one of the most recognizable and beloved birds in North America, Flickr populations have been cut nearly in half over the last several decades. A bird that's loud and conspicuous in our backyards is nevertheless slowly, quietly disappearing. So the next time you hear a Northern Flickr going nuts on your roof,

hammering enthusiastically on some piece of resonant metal, try not to get annoyed. Maybe just consider yourself lucky. All right, we did it. So did you learn anything new about the Northern Flickr here? I certainly did as I worked on this. episode. It's such a great bird and I'm always happy to see one. Thank you as always to the wonderful members of my Patreon community. Your ongoing financial support is what makes this podcast possible. I deeply appreciate the help. And if you, my friend, are interested in joining the elite ranks of the Science of Birds Patreon community, you can check out my Patreon page at patreon.com

slash science of birds. You can also shoot me an email if you have something you'd like to share with me, maybe some high praise for the podcast, or your favorite recipe that has ants as the main ingredient, or your suggestions for other Flickr common names. Another one I just came up with is the Lily Livered Dungbuster. Whatever the topic, you can send your emails to Ivan at Scienceofbirds.com. This is episode 131, 131.

You can check out the show notes for the episode along with some curated photos of Northern Flickers on the Science of Birds website, Scienceof Birds.com. And two other websites you can check out that are part of the greater science of birds ecosystem are birdmerch, birdmerch.com. Birdmerch is my online store where I've got some bird-themed t-shirts waiting for you. And that's birdmerch.com. And then over at wild latitudes.com, that is where you can see the birding and nature tours offered by my tour company, Wild Latitudes. I'm Ivan Philipson, and true fact about me, I am like the Northern Flickr, in that I'm pretty non-confrontational. I, too, follow the flight over fight rule. I'd rather run away than face conflict, especially of the violent variety.

I've never been in a proper fight in my life. Sure, I had some minor scuffles in elementary school and high school, but nothing I would call a fight, you know, with lots of punching, kicking, wrestling, screaming, cursing. My MO has been to either de-escalate the situation or just peace out when things start to get heated. And I hope I can make it through the rest of my life without any such silliness. Anyway, thanks for listening, wishing you all the best and all the birds. Cheers.