White-headed woodpecker
Dryobates albolarvatus
Bird
The only North American woodpecker with a plain white head on a black body, and the one most committed to pine seed. It works large-seeded western pines — ponderosa, sugar, Jeffrey, Coulter — prising seed straight from the cones and flaking bark for insects rather than drilling deep, and it nests in soft dead wood in open, big-tree stands.
Conservation
The birds need what an open, mature pine stand provides: large-diameter seed-bearing pines to feed in and soft snags to nest in. Fire suppression, the removal of large old trees, and the shift toward dense small-diameter stands have reduced that structure across much of the range, and this is a species several western states track for exactly that reason.
Plants in the catalog
Seed plants · 1
Takes seed directly from the cones of large-seeded western pines rather than drilling for insects the way most woodpeckers do, and needs the big old seed-bearing trees plus soft snags that an open ponderosa stand provides.
Range
Resident in western pine forest from southern interior British Columbia through Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and western Nevada to the Sierra Nevada and the mountains of southern California.
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.). White-headed woodpecker (Dryobates albolarvatus). Retrieved 2026, August 20, from https://plotwright.com/wildlife/white-headed-woodpecker
Sources used for this record
This record is compiled from the sources below.
Cornell Lab All About Birds: White-headed Woodpecker
Species account for the pine-seed diet, the bark-flaking foraging style, nesting in dead wood, and the dependence on open large-diameter pine stands.
GBIF: Leuconotopicus albolarvatus
GBIF backbone key 9128444. The backbone places this bird in Leuconotopicus and treats Dryobates albolarvatus as a synonym; this page uses the Dryobates combination that the American Ornithological Society checklist and Cornell currently apply.
iNaturalist: Leuconotopicus albolarvatus
iNaturalist taxon 1651488 is the active species record, filed under Leuconotopicus for the same genus split noted on the GBIF entry.
Wikipedia: White-headed woodpecker
Corroborating reference for the pine associations and for the competing generic placements of this species.