Acorn Woodpeckers and Sapsuckers
Welcome to the Show!
Seeing nature means slowing down and really looking. It's so easy to look right past what's actually there and see what we expect. I suppose this is why I'm so often surprised when I actually pay attention.
This lesson was reinforced during what has become an annual pilgrimage to the Willamette Valley in western Oregon (hooray for grandchildren!). It's a beautiful area and seeing an entirely different mix of trees, plants, birds and never fails to reveal a few surprises.
On our very first day in Oregon (August 2025) I was excited to spot a clan of Acorn Woodpeckers on a large tree* close to where our son and his family live. Six to ten of these unmistakable birds were buzzing around the tree which was pocked with several dozen quarter sized holes. This was the first time I had actually seen Acorn Woodpeckers but their reputation precedes them. They form nesting groups and each group typically sets up one or more cache trees known as 'graineries'. The birds drill hundreds (or thousands) of small holes in the tree and place an acorn in each hole. They guard this food store carefully with one bird always remaining at the cache tree while the others go around doing what Acorn Woodpeckers do. These birds are noisy and colorful and this approach to caching food is a remarkable display of cooperative behavior. This is a charismatic species.
An Acorn Woodpecker
Multiple Acorn Woodpeckers hanging around a tree with holes looked like a grainary tree but two things did not quite fit. First, after watching for a while I didn't see them paying any attention to what I thought must be their storage holes. And a couple of the birds didn't fit the model. They were similar enough to the Acorn Woodpeckers that I thought they might be females, or perhaps they were molting, but they were not the same as the others.
The small holes left of the woodpecker were drilled by sapsuckers
A Red-breasted Sapsucker. In general sapsuckers drill lots of small holes in a tree and feed on the sap released by the tree in response to the attack. The sap also attracts insects that the sapsucker and other birds consume
When I finally got a clear look I realized that the 'extras' were some kind of Sapsucker and from the photos I was able to name them, Red-breasted Sapsuckers. The tree was riddled with the neat rows of the small holes that sapsuckers make and reading up on Acorn Woodpeckers I learned they love to take advantage of the work that sapsuckers do.
The trees react to the holes by producing large amounts of sap and the sap attracts insects. Both of which feed the sapsuckers and the Acorn Woodpeckers.
It’s so easy to jump to conclusions. This was not a granary tree, it was simply Acorn Woodpeckers and Sapsuckers interacting around a food source.
