Minnesota park tries calling the rare red-headed woodpecker to new habitat

As Steven Hogg sees it, sometimes you have to pick up the critters and move them to the new habitat.

Sometimes if you build it, they will come.

And sometimes, when it's red-headed woodpeckers you're after, you chain a modified game caller to a tree and try to lure them with recordings of their own calls.

That's the approach Hogg took at Crow-Hassan Park Reserve in Rogers this spring in an experiment to attract the increasingly rare bird to nest in the park.

The woodpecker, whose entire head is completely red as if dipped in paint, was once common throughout Minnesota, but its numbers have plunged due to loss of nesting habitat — they seek cavities in dead trees or dead branches, plenty of insects and open grassland. Hogg, wildlife supervisor at Three Rivers Park District in Hennepin County, said the 2,500-acre reserve has what the birds need, if they would just move in.

"We have good habitat," Hogg said. "We have landscape that includes our wetlands and our prairies and our woods. We're trying to get as many species there as possible."

Three Rivers has seen success reintroducing other species around the district — trumpeter swans, ospreys, bullsnakes and regal fritillary butterflies, for example.

But trying to get red-headed woodpeckers to use the reserve posed its own challenge.

Manually moving them won't work, they say, because they could just fly back home — probably to the Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve in East Bethel where 70-100 adult red-heads have concentrated. They toyed with the idea of using decoys. They decided to gamble on a playback caller. The project only cost about $600.

John Moriarty, Three Rivers senior manager of wildlife, downplayed the effort as "some biologists having fun."

"It's fun and it's easy and if it works it will be really cool," he said.

It's worth a try, said Elena West, postdoctoral researcher who leads studies of red-headed woodpeckers at Cedar Creek. West estimates the feisty birds have declined in Minnesota by 95% over the past 50 years. That mirrors an alarming decline of bird populations across North America.

Hogg loaded a range of recorded red-headed woodpecker calls from Cornell University — minus the bird's alarm call — onto two FOXPRO HammerJack electronic predator call units, devices used for hunting animals such as coyotes. The callers sat all spring in locked plastic cases on the ground in two wooded spots in the reserve.

Recently, Hogg demonstrated them with volunteer Curt Oien of St. Michael who has been switching out the rechargeable batteries every two days.

Down in the cool woods of the reserve, Oien opened a box chained to the base of a hackberry tree, and switched on the caller. Out came a series of squawks, chattering and drumming. Cornell University describes one of the bird's common calls as a "shrill, hoarse tchur."

The calls played on a loop for three hours in the morning and evening this spring during migration, wafting through the leaves, beckoning.

It didn't work. Yet.

The recordings did, however, alarm a few hikers who called the district to report an animal trapped in a box chained to a tree.

"That was something I did not anticipate," Hogg said.

The park installed a sign nearby to tell visitors what was going on.

Farther into the Crow-Hassan reserve, next to a tiny deep pond called Pothole No. 8, they turned on the second unit. The tchurring started. Suddenly, a woodpecker flapped overhead into the tree. Heads shot up.

It turned out to be a red-bellied woodpecker, not the elusive red-headed variety.

"I was very hopeful for a second," Hogg said.

Hogg's team is removing the callers for now. They will try again next spring, but probably in different parks, Hogg said, possibly at the Murphy-Hanrehan Park Reserve.

Three Rivers had success using recorded calls to attract another species of bird, the purple martin, including at Noerenberg Memorial Gardens on Lake Minnetonka. Unlike red-headed woodpeckers, purple martins like to nest in man-made boxes set on the water's edge.

The crew bought a CD with the male bird's chittery dawn song and passed it out to volunteers, said Three Rivers wildlife biologist Angela Grill. They played it on whatever device they had. Oien volunteered on that project, too, and said he once had a purple martin land on his boombox while playing the song.

"We now have six active purple martin colonies in the district," Grill said.

Expectations for the red-headed woodpecker are more modest.

West, the researcher at Cedar Creek, said she's a bit skeptical the effort will work, but she is watching.

West noted that red-headed woodpeckers are very vocal and omnivorous, and they even snatch rodents. They are one of only four North American woodpecker species that sally, which means they catch insects as they are flying, she said. They drill on wood, but only for communication.

Restoring the woodpecker's lost habitat is what is most important to their survival, she said. Offering new opportunities can't hurt.

"They're trying," West said of the Three Rivers project. "That's all we can do right now. We don't have a lot of options.

"It takes a long time to grow trees."

Jennifer Bjorhus • 612-673-4683