Woodpeckers and forests

Do you remember the Mad Bird (Woddy Woodpecker in the American original)? That cartoon of a slightly tarumba bird that entertained many generations of children @s since the 1930s? Well, it's an American woodpecker, specifically the red-headed woodpecker (Melanerpes erythrocephalus). And why this introduction? Well, because today's post is going to be about them: woodpeckers.

Crazy Bird
Source: Wikipedia

Red-headed carpenter
Source: Wikipedia

Woodpeckers are somewhat special birds. To better understand them and get an idea of their importance in ecosystems, I'm going to tell you a little about their natural history and ecological characteristics. The family to which they belong (Picidae) is part of one of the oldest groups of birds that exist, the Piciformes, and is related to toucans, indicators and bearded birds. It is estimated that Piciformes originated about 60 million years ago in Eurasia and then spread to North and South America, although the scarce and fragmented fossil records of woodpeckers reflect that the Picidae family appears late in the evolutionary tree, approximately 5 million years ago in the Lower Pliocene. We can find picids from high mountains to sea level, on every continent except Antarctica and Australia-Oceania, which is why they are considered cosmopolitan birds. Most of the 210 species described are located in Central and South America, Southeast Asia and equatorial Africa, where it has its main centers of diversification. In Europe, there are 10 species of woodpeckers, 7 of which inhabit the Iberian Peninsula: the Eurasian torcecuello (Jynx torquilla), the real dick (Picus virdis), the black picamaderos (Dryocopus martius), Picapinos Peak (Dendrocopos major), the median peak (Dendrocopos medius), the white-backed beak (White-winged Woodpecker) and the minor peak (Dendrocopos minor).

Distribution of the Picidae family
Source: ibc.lynxeds.com

Medium peak
Source: www.ramonarambarri.com

Some of the characteristics that make these birds special are those related to their morphological adaptations, which are determined by the way in which they exploit the resources of the ecosystems they inhabit. Most species of carpenters are strictly forest birds, which means that in order to survive they need environments that have a minimum number of trees. This is because, on the one hand, they nest in tree hollows and, on the other, they are specialized in using xylophagous insects as their main food resource, which are those that rely on wood for food or to complete their biological cycles. This trophic exclusivity has conditioned, as I say, some curious morphological adaptations. They have pneumatized skulls that allow them to absorb the force of blows when drilling into wood (the famous rattling or drumming on branches and trunks), A language which is collected by turning the skull around and which is capable of stringing arthropods when it extends, fingers facing each other on their legs (zygodactyls) that facilitate their grip on vertical surfaces, and rigid tail feathers, or rectices, that help them to move and stabilize on the trunks.

Medium-billed skull
Source: www.skullsite.com

Picamaderos negro
Source: Wikipedia

Therefore, we are dealing with birds that are very dependent on mature forests. And it is precisely this quality that in recent years has attracted the attention of conservation technicians, especially in the Northern Hemisphere where they play a fundamental role in bird communities and other forest organisms. For example, the ability to drill through trunks and branches creates a network of secondary cavities in the forest that is essential for many other species that occupy them once abandoned. It has also been proven that they are capable of controlling some forest pests by feeding on the xylophagous insects that cause them. They have also been associated with wood-dependent or lignicultural fungi, as their preference for dead or rotting wood needs to be facilitated by this type of organism. And it seems that this interaction goes both ways, since polyporal fungi (such as the tinderberry fungus) could depend on woodpeckers as vectors for the dispersion of spores. These aspects confirm them as a highly specialized group of birds dependent on a specific type of forest, generally consisting of hardwoods and with high degrees of maturity and conservation. Thus, these characteristics in habitat selection make them good indicators of forest quality because their presence is indicative of the good health of the forest mass. That is why work is currently being done to understand the ecological relationships of these species to establish quality and conservation standards both in natural forests and in forest farms. We could conclude that whoever has a woodpecker has forest treasure.