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Great Spotted Woodpecker

Great Spotted Woodpecker

Dendrocopos major

Identify the Great Spotted Woodpecker by sound or photo and log your sightings with Birdpass.

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The Great Spotted Woodpecker is a medium-sized black-and-white woodpecker with a splash of red under the tail. Widespread across the Palearctic and into North Africa, it lives in all kinds of woodland as well as parks and gardens, and readily visits feeders. It announces itself with rapid, far-carrying drumming. Mostly resident, northern birds can irrupt south and west in years when conifer cone crops fail.

Did you know?

  • It was long believed that its drumming was a vocal sound; only in 1943 was it proven to be purely mechanical.
  • A single “anvil” crevice can be surrounded by hundreds of discarded cones.

Voice

Call
Flight call
Alarm call
Drumming

About the species

Identification

A medium-sized woodpecker with a white belly, bright red undertail, black wings barred with white and large white shoulder patches; the flanks are unstreaked. The male has a red nape patch, the female an all-black crown; juveniles have a red crown. Told from Lesser Spotted Woodpecker by its larger size and white shoulder patches, and from White-backed Woodpecker by its black back and unstreaked flanks.

Family

Picidae

Size

Medium (thrush)

Colours

black, white, red

About the habitat

All kinds of woodland from mature coniferous and mixed forest to deciduous woods, as well as parks, gardens and wooded edges.

Diet

Insects and larvae prised from bark and wood, seeds from conifer cones, nuts and berries; sometimes eggs and nestlings of other birds. At feeders it takes fat and peanuts.

Behaviour

Climbs trunks with stiff tail support, hammering to find food and to excavate its unlined nest hole in dead or decaying wood. It wedges cones and nuts into a crevice – an “anvil” – to hammer them open. Both sexes drum to advertise territory, the male more often. Both parents incubate and feed the young; after fledging each parent tends part of the brood. Its flight is strongly undulating.

Sources

Photo: Charles J. Sharp, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Great spotted woodpecker (Dendrocopos major) male Drenthe.jpg

Sound: Sonothèque ADVL, XC707123, CC0 1.0 https://xeno-canto.org/707123

Sound: Sonothèque ADVL, XC707121, CC0 1.0 https://xeno-canto.org/707121

Sound: wilmet sebastien, XC961741, CC0 1.0 https://xeno-canto.org/961741

Sound: Sonothèque ADVL, XC918609, CC0 1.0 https://xeno-canto.org/918609

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

See also