Woodpeckers

Overview

Woodpeckers are the birds that chisel the old timber for the grubs inside. They go where wood is softening, and so their work shows a tender where a living tree is rotting long before it falls. In a forest where a great fall can crush a dwelling and flood a string of hollows in a night, the forest peoples listen to them.

Appearance

The commonest kind is the size of a thrush: black and white in bold bars and patches, with a crimson cap or nape and a red patch under the tail. A larger green kind, the size of a pigeon, has a yellow rump and a red crown and feeds on the ground among the roots. A rare great black woodpecker, as big as a crow, lives in the deepest stands.

They hitch up a trunk in short jerks, propped on stiff tail feathers, and fly in deep, bounding dips. In spring they drum: a fast, hard rattle on a dead or hollow limb that carries far through the forest. The green kind laughs, a loud ringing call.

Habitat and Range

Woodpeckers live wherever there is old timber: throughout the Elderweald, in the trained trees and old stands of the Crownboughs, and in the foothill woods of the Headwater Marches.

Behaviour and Temperament

A woodpecker feeds on beetle grubs, ants, and the larvae inside softening wood, finding them by tapping and listening, then chiselling in and drawing them out with a long, barbed tongue. Each pair holds a stretch of woodland and drums to claim it. They are shy of people but busy enough not to notice a quiet watcher.

Life Cycle

A pair cuts a fresh nest hole in a softening trunk each spring and raises four to six young in it. Old holes become the homes of owls, bats, and martens. Woodpeckers live five to ten years.

Uses and Dangers

They do no harm, unless one takes to drumming on a hall's eaves. Their use is warning. A tender walking a stand listens for where the birds drum and where they feed: a bird that chisels into living timber has found rot there, and a tree with many fresh holes is a tree to watch. Foothill woodcutters use the same knowledge to find the hollow trees not worth felling.

Lore and Belief

Wood Elves say the woodpecker is the forest's physician, which knocks before it enters. In the Crownboughs a woodpecker working a hall's bough is news no house ignores, and a house that ignores it is gossiped about by every other. Headwater folk hold that a woodpecker's drumming in late winter means rain.

Where It Appears

• Overview: Animals