Some creatures hold a mystic grasp on my birding imagination. They are rare, elusive, or just plain odd. The Black-backed Woodpecker may just possess all three of those attributes in a single animal. Incredibly patchy in distribution due to their requirement of recently burnt forests for both nesting and feeding, Black-backed Woodpeckers are scattered widely across the landscape. Once a forest fire has blacken the trunks, wood-boring insects soon arrive to reap the harvest of the deceased timber. The Black-backed Woodpecker, in turn, preys upon those insects, primarily Monochamus spp. and Dendroctonus englamanni. Once the insects have exhausted the food supply, they disappear as do the woodpeckers. This constant seeking of new opportunities creates a nomadic lifestyle. They are always dissolving into memory.
The odd characteristic of the Black-backed Woodpecker is a trait that it shares with its close cousin, the American Three-toed Woodpecker…it is the fact that Black-backed Woodpeckers have 3 toes, well actually not quite, 2 toes are fused into a single functional rear toe.
Last week, I received word that Black-backed Woodpeckers were being seen at a recent burn along the Clark Fork River. Vida and I made it to the site around 5 in the afternoon, and within 10 minutes, we had found the nest hole and its rather cooperative occupants. The male showed particularly well, and with his indulgence I was rattled off a few quality shots of the ever elusive Black-backed Woodpecker.
