Tuesday, February 21, 2012

How does a Pileated Woodpecker find food?

pileated woodpecker hole
Check out a morning's work from a pileated woodpecker behind our home in Nolalu, ON.
It neatly carved out a sizeable portion of the base of a live balsam fir tree, apparently looking for carpenter ants inside. There were indeed some ant tunnels at the most interior of this excavation.
Conventional wisdom is that woodpeckers can hear the bugs moving inside the tree or under the bark. In this case, the ant tunnels were several inches inside. So, did the woodpecker hear them through all that wood?
And are carpenter ants active enough in the winter for a woodpecker to hear them crunching wood or otherwise making sound?
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