Casual Birds of Oklahoma: Lewis's Woodpecker

A common bird of the west, it was unheard of in Oklahoma until it arrived in 2013 at Taylor Lake in Grady, and it still remains today at Fort Towson in Choctaw.  It remained at Lake Carl Blackwell from November 2014 - March 2015.  Perhaps it will be located again in the fall of 2018.  It certainly has been in quite a few places in Oklahoma.

This bird was named by ornithologist Alexander Wilson for Meriwether Lewis of Lewis and Clark fame.   Lewis discovered this species while surveying areas for the Louisiana Purchase in 1804-06.

It may look like a woodpecker, but it appears to be a cross between a crow and a flycatcher.  There is also no other woodpecker with the same color scheme.  For a woodpecker, even the bill is thinner than most.  In appropriate light, this bird is dressed with a dark green back, dark red face, pink belly, and gray collar.

                                                              Lewis's Woodpecker
                                                         Lake Carl Blackwell, 2014

Flight is slow with frequent gliding and it perches upright on bare branches to sally after insects.

When the Lewis's Woodpecker was at Lake Carl Blackwell, it had a beautiful intact snag all to itself, and it would fly from it to pine trees for a short time, then return.  Once that snag was no more, neither was the bird.

These birds are threatened by changing forests due to fire suppression, logging and grazing.  These events will result in high densities of pines of the same age, as well as few standing nest snags.

This bird enjoys sitting out in the open, as opposed to heavy cover like most woodpeckers do.  It forages for berries and nuts, and in the fall will shell and store same in cracks and crevices of trees to consume in winter.  It will even partake of food at feeders, but has an aggressive nature.

The male constructs a nest in a cavity in a dead tree branch.  The female will incubate during the day and the male takes over at night.  Incubation is just under two weeks, and the young will leave the nest cavity in four or five weeks.

Now that the woodpecker is appearing more and more, it has lost its accidental status, and might just well become a breeding bird at some point.  After all, they do like large cottonwoods along creek beds, and those ponderosa pines are always attractive and always will be, which we do have here in Oklahoma.  We are right next door to states that have them breeding there, so it makes sense that they are exploring for more territory, especially with rising temperatures over the past decades.