After another weekend of cold and, at times, wet weather, it was lovely to wake up to a milder, sunny, and calm day today. The almost springlike weather was certainly appreciated by this week's species of the week - the great spotted woodpecker. Our volunteers reported hearing several of these beautiful birds drumming in the woods - for those who aren't familiar with what drumming is, I'll come back tot hat later.
Great spotted woodpeckers are the commonest of the three resident British woodpeckers, and the most likely to occur in your garden ( a fourth species, the wryneck, is a rare passage migrant that formerly bred in the UK). They are relatively large for a garden bird, being similar in size to a starling.
Great spotted woodpeckers are mainly black above and white below. They have various white spots on the upperparts, including a characteristic large white oval on the upperwing. In contrast, the much smaller (sparrow-sized) lesser spotted woodpecker, which is now very rare in most areas and almost extinct in Suffolk, has a white ladder marking on the upperparts. Great spots also have a red patch under the tail, around the vent, which is absent on lesser spots.
Great spotted woodpecker showing the white oval wing patch and red underparts. Photo by Alan Moffet (rspb-images.com)
Male great spotted woodpeckers have a small red patch on the hindcrown, which females lacks. Young birds, which often visit gardens in late summer, have red crowns. In this plumage, they are often mistaken for male lesser spots, which always have a red crown, but note the other features described above. In most cases, you will not have to worry about such identification conundrums as lesser spotted woodpeckers are now so rare that any sighting is a bonus - they haven't bred at Minsmere for about 20 years, so you're unlikely to see one here, and even where they are present they will rarely visit gardens.
As with other birds, great spotted woodpeckers display to mark out their territory and attract a mate. While most garden birds do this by singing, great spots have a different tactic: drumming. If you've seen or heard a woodpecker drumming, you'll know how the term came about. They repeatedly and rapidly hammer their beak against a (usually) dead trunk or branch, making a drumming sound that echoes around the woods. Often a second bird will return the drum.
Drumming is the equivalent of birdsong and is purely a courtship/display ritual. When drumming, great spots are not actually excavating their nest hole. That's done later in the spring with a much slower, more forceful tapping. While both great and spotted woodpeckers will drum, the third British species, the green woodpecker, very rarely does.
Are you lucky enough to see great spotted woodpeckers in your garden? If so, I hope they put in appearance during the Big Garden Birdwatch this weekend. Although I've heard them nearby, and seen them flying over, I've never attracted one into my own garden, though a green woodpecker does occasional visit the lawn to feast on ants.
The drumming great spotted woodpeckers were not the only sign of spring at Minsmere today, with robins and wrens in full song and hazel catkins dangling from branches and ducks displaying on the Scrape.
Hazel catkins
There were some interesting species seen here today too, with the glossy ibis still feeding on flooded marshes at Eastbridge, the glaucous seen along the beach a couple of times, a brief visit to Island Mere by the flock of nine Bewick's swans, and a lovely male long-tailed duck seen offshore. The latter can often be seen feeding among a flock of common scoters offshore from Dunwich, and two velvet scoters were among them over the weekend too. Other highlights today included kingfisher, the pale-phase buzzard, water rail, bearded tits and snipe, while a water pipit was seen at Island Mere yesterday.