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Eurasian Three-toed Woodpecker

Eurasian Three-toed Woodpecker

Picoides tridactylus

Identify the Eurasian Three-toed Woodpecker by sound or photo and log your sightings with Birdpass.

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The Eurasian Three-toed Woodpecker is a medium-sized, black-and-white woodpecker of boreal and mountain conifer forests from northern Europe across Siberia to Japan. True to its name, it has only three toes, and it shows no red: the male has a yellow crown. It specialises in bark beetle larvae and gathers where beetles are abundant after fires, storms or beetle outbreaks.

Did you know?

  • It has only three toes, not four like most woodpeckers.
  • It is the only European woodpecker whose male has a yellow rather than red crown.

Voice

Call

About the species

Identification

A medium-sized woodpecker with black upperparts and head and a white stripe down the back. The underparts are pale with black bars on the flanks. There is no red at all; the adult male's crown is yellow, which separates it from other woodpeckers. It has only three toes. Compared with Great Spotted Woodpecker it lacks the white shoulder patches and red vent.

Family

Picidae

Size

Medium (thrush)

Colours

black, white, yellow, brown

About the habitat

Boreal and mountain coniferous forest, especially spruce-dominated stands with plenty of dead and dying trees; it favours recently disturbed areas such as burnt, windthrown or beetle-killed forest.

Diet

Mainly larvae of bark beetles and other wood-boring beetles taken from conifers; also other insects and spiders, and tree sap from rows of holes it drills in spring.

Behaviour

Often quiet and unobtrusive, it forages by flaking bark off spruces and other conifers to expose larvae, leaving tell-tale patches of stripped bark. It drills rings of sap wells in living trees. Pairs excavate a new nest hole each year, usually in a dead conifer. Its drumming is a fairly soft, steady roll, and the call a soft “kik”. Mostly resident.

Sources

Photo: Francesco Veronesi from Italy, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Three-toed Woodpecker - Finlandia 0005 (3).jpg

Sound: Doug Hynes, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Picoides_dorsalis_-_American_Three-toed_Woodpecker_XC613386.mp3

Text: Wikipedia (English) + FinBIF species descriptions, CC BY-SA 4.0; FinBIF: CC BY 4.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasian_three-toed_woodpecker

See also