A Bird Haiku Per Day in May Day 18: Northern Flicker
2 min readMay 18, 2017
Spotted breast with black
A woodpecker on the ground
Drumming to be heard
If you’ve got a chimney with a metal cap, you’ve probably had a visit from a crow-sized Northern flicker. Plenty of friends of mine (and my wife, for that matter) who have grown up in the Pacific Northwest consider flickers banging on metal chimney caps as one of the heralds of spring. Like most woodpecker species, male flickers will drum on hollow, metal objects to make as much racket as possible in order to attract a mate. Unlike most woodpeckers, though, flickers feed for insects on the ground more often than pecking holes in tree trunks.
