Downy woodpecker
Dryobates pubescens
Bird
The smallest woodpecker in North America and a year-round resident of woodlands, parks, and backyards. It forages acrobatically over trunks, limbs, and small twigs of deciduous trees, gleaning and hammering for beetle larvae, ants, caterpillars, and other bark and wood insects. Both sexes excavate nest cavities in dead limbs and standing snags, often in fungus-softened wood, which makes retaining dead wood a direct habitat action. In winter it shifts to more tapping and excavating, working weed and seedhead stems such as goldenrod to extract gall-fly larvae and supplementing its diet with seeds and berries.
Conservation
IUCN Red List: Least Concern, with a large range, large population, and no evidence of significant decline.
Plants in the catalog
Fruit plants · 6
Seed plants · 4
Shelter plants · 16
Mature open-grown longleaf pines provide bark-foraging surface and cavity and nesting structure for woodpeckers; this generic woodpecker slug stands in for the cavity-nesting birds that depend on old longleaf stands (most famously the red-cockaded woodpecker, which has no slug in this catalog).
Woodpeckers forage on oak trunks and limbs and excavate cavities in older wood; recorded as plausible for this species rather than a Shumard-specific documented tie.
Range
Resident across most of forested North America from Alaska and Canada south through the United States, absent only from the southwestern deserts and the far northern tundra.