Black-backed Woodpecker

What you notice first

Loud, deliberate flaking of bark off a dead conifer — big pale chips on the snow at the base of the tree — and then a stocky woodpecker with a solid black back and, on the male, a yellow crown.

Voice

A single sharp, low "chik," lower and harder than a Hairy's; a fast rattling scream when agitated; slow, measured drumming that often accelerates at the end.

Where & when

Boreal conifer forest in the North Country and higher elevations — Pondicherry, the Umbagog area, Kilkenny, burns and bogs with abundant standing dead wood. Year-round; found by walking recently disturbed stands and listening for foraging.

Why it's hard

Habitat specialist at its range edge. It depends on a short-lived resource — the wood-boring beetle larvae that flood into conifers in the first few years after a fire or an insect outbreak — so the birds are thin on the ground, patchily distributed, and tied to disturbance events in a small northern area.

Only three toes, not four — a trait it shares with the even rarer American Three-toed Woodpecker — thought to give a better bracing angle for the sideways, levering strokes it uses to strip bark rather than excavate deep.

Black-backed Woodpeckers are burn specialists. After a forest fire, beetles arrive to lay eggs in the dying trees, the larvae bore into the wood, and for three to five years a burned stand is one of the richest woodpecker foraging grounds in North America — then the resource runs out and the birds move on to the next disturbance. In a landscape where fire is suppressed, they lean on beaver-flooded stands, bogs, and budworm outbreaks.

In New Hampshire, look and listen in the standing dead timber at Pondicherry, or any North Country conifer stand that’s recently died back.