Meet Flicker Poirot, Bird Detective
Step aside Hercule, the Northern Flicker is on the case.
Precise. Elegant. Kind-hearted. Thwarter of crime. Sporting an excellent moustache. And… perched in a tree? Am I describing the famous Belgian detective Hercule Poirot? Has he gone mad? No. I am, in fact, describing the Northern Flicker. Or a male, yellow-shafted Northern Flicker to be exact.
Okay, maybe the Northern Flicker doesn’t go around finding bad guys and uncovering deep dark secrets. But what do we know? Bird are mysterious creature after all.
What we do know is that the Northern Flicker comes in two varieties: yellow-shafted and red-shafted. Yellow-shafted Flickers live in the eastern half on the United States and have black moustaches. Their name comes from the yellow shafts of feathers in their tails. These Flickers are also yellow on the underside of their wings and have a spot of red on the back of their necks.
In contrast, red-shafted Northern Flickers live in the western half of the United States. These birds are more brown-ish and have red feathers in their tails and the underside of their wings. Although they too sport nice moustaches, theirs are red instead of black.
Female Northern Flickers also come in the yellow- and red-shafted varieties and look very similar to their male counterparts—with the key exception of having no moustaches.
Flickers are a type of woodpecker, which is why you will see them poking around on trees and sporting long, sharp bills. They also look somewhat similar to the Red-bellied Woodpecker, but are larger and have a differently shaped and positioned red spot.
But despite being, well a woodpecker, the Northern Flicker prefers to dig into the ground in search of insects to eat. Ants, in particular, are among their favorite foods.
When I first photographed a Northern Flicker, it was foraging on the ground. This was confusing to me since I had never seen a woodpecker below tree-level before! Yet this is perfectly normal behavior for these fine birds.
Sometimes yellow- and red-shafted Flickers get together and create hybrids that are neither fully either color. The Northern Flicker can be found year-round across nearly the entire continental United States, not including Alaska and part of California and Texas.
Until next (Bird!) time,
Grover