10/12/2026
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🪵 If a dead tree in the yard can't reach the house, the fence or the street when it falls, leave it standing, and if it can, have the arborist cut it to a 12-to-15-foot stub instead of a stump. A standing dead trunk is a pantry first, then a nest, then an apartment house for everything that can't dig its own, and in most yards it's the one thing the woodpeckers are short of. Across the Midwest and East, the ash killed by emerald ash borer have been the woodpeckers' windfall; red-bellied woodpecker and nuthatch numbers rose in the infested counties, and a dead ash away from the house does more work standing than it would split and stacked.
On the poster they look like distant cousins. They're one family, and in a good patch of eastern woods all six work the same trees in different ways: the pileated takes the big dead trunks apart for carpenter ants, the flicker eats ants off the lawn, the red-bellied and the hairy work the bark, the sapsucker drills its rows of holes in the maple and the birch, and the downy, a third the size of the pileated, works the twigs and the goldenrod galls the big ones can't hang onto.
🌳 The downy, the hairy and the red-bellied are the yard birds, and they come through orchards and tree-lined streets as readily as woods. A suet cake in a wire cage, hung on a trunk or a pole, brings them in from now until spring; the downy is the woodpecker that turns up at the most feeders in the winter counts, and in a wooded suburb a large suet feeder with a tail prop will bring the pileated too.
From late January in the South and February up north, the drumming starts: short, even bursts on the most resonant thing in the territory, and sometimes that's a gutter, a chimney cap or a hollow fascia board. That's a bird advertising, not eating the house, and it stops once the pairs are set. Holes in the siding are a different matter; that's a woodpecker after carpenter bee or beetle larvae in the wood, or starting a roost hole in soft cedar, and the board needs a look.
A small pile of fresh pale chips at the foot of a trunk gives a woodpecker away even when the bird stays out of sight, and chips the size of a thumbnail mean the pileated has been by.
This month the yellow-bellied sapsuckers are arriving across the South for the winter and the flickers are passing through in numbers; the other four are already in the yard. West of the Rockies the cast changes, the acorn and Nuttall's woodpeckers for the red-bellied and the red-breasted and red-naped sapsuckers for the yellow-bellied, but the dead tree and the suet work the same.
Leave the trunk, hang the suet, and some February morning a dry, even drumroll from the dead tree will tell you who took the apartment 🔊
