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by 0x0203 440 days ago
Not listed is the red-bellied woodpecker. I've got one of them that drums on my gutters just outside my home office window every day. Multiple times a day. Fast, evenly spaced drumming with no variation or fall-off. Lasts 1-3 seconds. Maybe not quite as fast as the flicker, but close.

I thought he was putting holes in my house for a while until I figured out what he was doing. I have a lot of flickers around too, but don't hear them drumming very often.
2 comments
rsolva 440 days ago
Yeah, we got these red-bellied wodpeckers here, knocking on the metal top of the poles of the electricity lines. Since the main inlet is connect to a wall in our bed room, they wake us up early in the morning by their drumming, resonationg through the electricity lines from near and far.

It have spent hours, half aslep, pondering what that sound could be, it took quite a while before I found the origin!

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silisili 440 days ago
If you put a suet cage out, they'll usually go for that and leave your house alone.

I used to joke that they'll let you know when they're out of suet, by hammering your gutters to wake you up at 6am.

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sdenton4 440 days ago
It's likely that they're drumming on the gutter because the metal is loud. Drumming is both a way to get at food by digging under the bark and a way to signal for territory+mating. The signaling is the main reason that the drumming patterns are distinct!
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dreamcompiler 440 days ago
I used to put suet cages out. Then I'd walk outside on summer mornings to find my porch and gutters utterly destroyed. Finally figured out it was black bears that came in the night trying to get at the bird food.

So no more suet for the woodpeckers.

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genewitch 440 days ago
if you have bears about you can't leave food out cmon people
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0x0203 440 days ago
Amusingly, it wasn't until I put the feeder out (with suet and a bunch of other seed) that he started drumming. It wasn't right away; there was about a year or so where the red-bellied just came for the food. There were several different males and females back then. Now, I'm pretty sure it's just him. I've read that they can drum like this in part to mark territory, so maybe he's just trying to keep the food for himself. He still has to duke it out with all the other birds though. Can be pretty entertaining.

And fortunately, I'm usually up by 4 or 5 am anyway so he's never woken me up, but yes, he's banging away really early.

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