Red-bellied woodpeckers range from Twin Cities urban yards to Boundary Waters

Red-bellied woodpeckers have been part of Minnesota's landscape since the early 1900s.

They were reported in 1932 by Dr. Thomas Sadler Roberts when his seminal book "Birds of Minnesota," was published. He worked from personal records dating to 1874.

When English naturalist Mark Catesby published his book "The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands" in the 1730s, he included the red-bellied birds.

The Swedish taxonomist Carl Linnaeus gave the bird the scientific name Melanerpes carolinus (as in, a genus of woodpeckers first noted in the Carolinas).

Linnaeus, by the way, created the modern system of binomial names for organisms. Birds and other forms of life might be known by different names in different locales, but the uniform scientific names keep everyone, particularly scientists, on the same page.

Linnaeus didn't but perhaps could have changed the common name from red-bellied to something more appropriate, the red bellies not an easily seen feature of the bird. Of course, he, in Sweden, never actually saw the bird.

Anyway, we were talking about red-bellied geography. In Catesby's time they were birds of eastern and southern forests, gradually moving north and west as we grew warmer.

The birds weren't prescient, moving ahead of an anticipated warming climate. They simply followed opportunity.

As recently as the 1980s the bird was scarce here, worth a chase by birders keeping score of their sightings. That could have been 100 years after their initial arrival in the state.

An ultimate Minnesota sighting was made in the Boundary Waters canoe area on the Canadian border a couple of years ago. The centuries-long journey north was complete.

The woodpeckers are permanent residents now, common to uncommon in winter in Twin Cities neighborhoods, according to Robert Janssen in the 2019 edition of his book "Birds in Minnesota." The birds are a good urban fit. Feeders likely help.

They are regular in our western Hennepin County neighborhood, nesters and frequent visitors to our sunflower seed feeders.

Red-bellieds seldom hack into wood for insects. They forage for insects found on trees, and for fruit, nuts, seeds; they take suet. They are opportunistic feeders.

They will store food for winter. In early November we had that species diligently taking sunflower seeds one at a time from a feeder for caching here and in neighboring yards.

Blue jays cache too, a difference being the jays stuff their cheeks with seeds; less work, more return. Red-bellied birds, taking one seed at a time, obviously find the effort worth the reward.

In captivity, red-bellied woodpeckers have been known to store miscellaneous items like nails, toothpicks, paper clips and paper. The behavior must be strongly instinctive.

The birds have an interesting tongue, as do many bird species. According to the "Birds of North America" monograph, the red-bellied's tongue is highly modified — "cylindrical, pointed, and barbed at the tip, extending 1.5 inches beyond the tip of the bill."

High maneuverability of the tongue makes this species more successful at extracting prey from crevices than other woodpecker species, so it says.

An enlarged mucous gland makes the tongue sticky, "and a special nasal mucous gland is thought to exclude wood chips and dust from the nasal passages."

Have you ever watched a woodpecker at work and thought about the problem of dust up its nose? Would it sneeze?

The bird's population is not threatened at the moment, perhaps on the increase. Not all the news is bad.

Lifelong birder Jim Williams can be reached at woodduck38@gmail.com.