A series following the 72 British mini-seasons of Nature’s Calendar by Kiera Chapman, Lulah Ellender, Rowan Jaines and Rebecca Warren. 

Dear Readers, I’ve been hearing great spotted woodpeckers drumming away for the past few weeks, especially in our local patch of ancient woodland, Coldfall Wood, and indeed at our local garden centre. But listen as I might, I haven’t heard the higher-pitched drumming of the lesser spotted woodpecker. You might remember that there had been a very interesting project involving passive acoustic monitoring for the bird’s calls and drumming in the south of England, which indicated that there might be lots more of the birds about than we first thought. Fingers crossed!

And let’s not forget that ‘flying dragon’, the green woodpecker. It rarely drums, as it spends most of its time tapping away at anthills, but you can still hear it ‘yaffling’ away at this time of year. And very distinctive it is too! Though possibly confused with that other green bird of North London, the rose-ringed parakeet.

Rose-ringed parakeet

Green woodpecker

And so, let’s see what I had to say about woodpeckers in 2024..

 

Dear Readers, great spotted woodpeckers come and go in my garden – one will visit for a few days or weeks, and then there will be a gap for several months or even years. But you can be sure of hearing a woodpecker drumming if you take a walk in St Pancras and Islington Cemetery, or Coldfall Wood. Woodpeckers were thought for the longest time to have shock absorbers in their skulls, to stop them from getting concussion, but last year it was discovered that this was not, in fact, the case. However, as Lulah Ellender points out in her piece in Nature’s Calendar, the idea had already inspired designer Anirudha Surabhi to design a cardboard cycle helmet based on the three-layers (bone, cartilage and foam) that were supposed to protect the bird’s brain. And very exciting it looks too! Sadly it was never brought to market – the cardboard would have to be waterproof, which would involve using some non-recyclable components. The company survives as Quin, which manufactures ultra-safe motorcycle helmets.

However, just because the skull of the woodpecker isn’t what protects it from concussion, it doesn’t mean that these birds are not superbly adapted to a life that involves ‘bashing your head against something hard’. Because they eat grubs that might be buried deep inside trees, woodpeckers have extremely long tongues that actually wrap around their skulls when not in use.

But how about that drumming/drilling activity? Whenever I try to do any drilling I almost invariably get stuck at some point, and Ellender mentions that the same thing happens to woodpeckers – in fact, it’s been estimated that they get stuck approximately 36 per cent of the time. I’d be taking that beak back to B&Q if it was me, but as the woodpecker is rather stuck with its appendage, it’s developed a number of ways of getting around the problem, such as ‘walking’ their bills out of the hole a bit at a time.

And here for your delectation is an actual film of an actual woodpecker in Coldfall Wood here in East Finchley. It was recorded at maximum magnification, hence all the movement, so if you are of a queasy disposition you might want to give it a miss.

Woodpeckers are adapted in every way for their arboreal life styles, from the protective membrane and stiff nasal hairs that keep the dust out to their stiff tail feathers to enable them to stand ‘upright’ while drumming. They are both shy and bold, loud and elusive, as anyone who has ever tried to find the location of a drumming bird will know. They are the very sound of the woods at the start of the year. And how about this poem? Philip Gross is a poet that I haven’t come across before, but I’ll certainly keep my eyes open now…

A woodpecker’s
BY PHILIP GROSS

                                 working the valley
or is it the other way round?

That bone-clinking clatter, maracas
or knucklebones or dance of  gravel

on a drumskin, the string of  the air
twanged on the hollow body of  itself …

It’s the tree that gives voice,
the fifty-foot windpipe, and the bird

is its voice box, the shuddering
membrane that troubles the space

inside, which otherwise would be
all whispers, scratch-and-scrabblings,

the low dry flute-mouth of wind
at its  just-right or just-wrong angle,

the cough-clearing of moss
or newly ripened rot falling in.

But the woodpecker picks the whole
wood up and shakes it, plays it

as his gamelan, with every sounding
pinged from every branch his instrument.

Or rather, it’s the one dead trunk,
the tree, that sings its dying, and this

is the quick of  it; red-black-white, the bird
in uniform, alert, upstanding to attention

is its attention, our attention, how the forest,
in this moment, looks up, knows itself.