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.
Plan for this species
Location-fit plant set for Chicago, IL: host and specialist plants first, then nectar, fruit, seed, foliage, and shelter plants that still fit the current and mid-century climate read.
0 essential relationships / 6 supporting plants
Host/specialist links: 0
Forage/pollination links: 6
Shelter links: 0
Relationship roles: 1
American elderberry
Supporting / Fruit plants
American persimmon
Supporting / Fruit plants
Blue elderberry
Supporting / Fruit plants
Golden currant
Supporting / Fruit plants
Gray dogwood
Supporting / Fruit plants
Also named on the Wildflower Center record, and a useful reminder that woodpeckers are not purely insectivorous - downies take a substantial amount of fruit in autumn. The northern cardinal is named alongside it on the same source and has no entry in this wildlife catalog, so it appears here in prose rather than as a wired relationship.
Red mulberry
Supporting / Fruit plants
Plants in the catalog
Fruit plants · 8
Also named on the Wildflower Center record, and a useful reminder that woodpeckers are not purely insectivorous - downies take a substantial amount of fruit in autumn. The northern cardinal is named alongside it on the same source and has no entry in this wildlife catalog, so it appears here in prose rather than as a wired relationship.
Downy woodpeckers take fruit as a routine part of a mixed diet and dogwood drupes are among the fruits recorded for the group, but the published feeding records are at genus level and mostly on the tree dogwoods rather than specifically on Cornus amomum, so this is marked plausible rather than documented. The stems are too slender for nest cavities, so the value here is food and cover, not nesting.
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.
Sources & citations
Cite this page
Use this citation for the Plotwright wildlife record. Use the source cards below to explore the references that informed its taxonomy, range, conservation, host plants, foraging, and habitat.
Plotwright. (n.d.). Downy woodpecker (Dryobates pubescens). Retrieved 2026, August 20, from https://plotwright.com/wildlife/downy-woodpecker
Sources used for this record
This record is compiled from the sources below.
Cornell Lab: Downy Woodpecker
Bird-guide reference for identity, North American range, low-concern status, bark/stem insect foraging, and cavity nesting in dead wood.
GBIF: Dryobates pubescens
GBIF backbone record confirming the accepted species name and aggregating occurrence data documenting its distribution across forested North America.
iNaturalist: Downy Woodpecker
iNaturalist taxon page corroborating the accepted name and mapping verified community observations across its range.
Downy woodpecker - Wikipedia
Encyclopedia overview covering identification, North American range, and cavity-nesting and foraging life-cycle details.