Common in NH
Hairy Woodpecker
Dryobates villosus · Woodpeckers (Picidae)
- Status
- Year-round resident, mature forest statewide; less numerous than the Downy
- Length
- 7.1–10.2 in
- Regions
- Coast · Merrimack · Lakes · The Whites · Conn. River
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What you notice first
A "Downy" that looks wrong — bigger-headed, longer-billed, and it barks a sharp "PEEK!" that's flatter and more emphatic than a Downy's soft pik.
Voice
A loud, sharp "peek," higher and harder than a Downy's; a rattle that stays level in pitch rather than descending. Drumming is fast and long.
Where & when
Larger tracts of mature deciduous and mixed forest, and up into the spruce woods where the Downy thins out. Suet feeders near woods. Year-round, all counties, but you work a bit for it.
Same pattern as the Downy, scaled up and coarsened. The reliable marks: bill length roughly equal to head width, clean white outer tail feathers with no black bars, a larger overall size that reads in the field as “chunky” rather than “cute.” The call helps once you’ve heard both — the Hairy’s “peek” is a slap, the Downy’s “pik” is a tap.
Hairies favour bigger woods and follow disturbance: burns, blowdowns, beaver-killed stands, and forests hit by spruce budworm, where they take a lot of wood-boring beetle larvae. In the North Country they overlap with the two boreal woodpeckers and you have to keep the back pattern and the head markings straight.
Where a Downy will nest in a fencepost, a Hairy wants a real tree.