NATURE COLUMN: Bill Cawley
I WAS in correspondence with a resident of Westwood Park on woodpeckers the other day.
I am aware of the great spotted woodpecker, whose distinctive drumming sound is very evident around Westwood Rec.
The green woodpecker I was less so, and whether it existed in the area, but pictures furnished by the local of a green woodpecker on her lawn was incontrovertible proof of the existence of picus viridis – its Latin name – locally.
The green woodpecker is roughly the same size as a pigeon.
It has the most attractive plumage of green and yellow with a rich crown of scarlet and a stripe of similar colour below an area of black above the eye.
The bird’s beak is hard and wedge shaped adapted to boring into decaying wood.
It is reclusive. I have only seen one once in a wood in Great
Malvern scurrying up the trunk of a tree like a cat.
It never perches on branches and nests into the hollows of dying trees.
Its flight is short and heavy. It is not elegant and has been described as looping.
It feeds on insects and much of its food it picks up off the floor. It seeks out ants and their eggs and is also partial to woodlice. They are said to attack wasp’s nests eating the pupa.
A nature writer did see one bounding along the ground in prodigious leaps holding its body almost erect, its wings partly expanded, neck extended and head turned from side to side.
In this manner it covered about 50 metres in only a few seconds.
The antics of the woodpecker have led to many legends of which the most charming is from the Native American tribe Lenape from what is now New Jersey.
Long ago the sugar maple Axsinaminshi was suffering from itching caused by grubs burrowing underneath the bark.
The itch became unbearable and he called on the animals of the forest to help.
They were concerned with their own affairs and offered only sympathy. The woodpecker came along and said he could help. He bought his family.
All of them worked hard and eventually all the grubs were removed. Axsinnaminshi thanks the birds mightily and they thanked the sugar maple for the meal of grubs.
The green woodpecker is also known by a variety of names around the country.
Yaffle from its mocking cry prevalent in Devon. Woodsprite in Norfolk, the Whyttel in Yorkshire probably from the Anglo Saxon word whytel meaning to cut into wood and finally most charming of all Laughing Betsy in Sussex.
John Aubrey, a 16th Century English antiquarian, noted that the green woodpecker was used by the druids for divination and stated that ‘to this day the country people do divine of raine by their cry’.
Consequently it was also called the Weathercock.