SKIDAWAY ISLAND, Georgia — The bird materializes out of nowhere, a flash of red that lands on a branch not ten feet away. With a giant acorn lodged in his beak and jet-black eyes trained right on me, it’s as if he’s posing for a photo.
It’s the kind of luck that makes your day on the birding trail. But there’s a reason why gifts like this came at us the whole time we wandered this stretch of wetlands, woodlands, and beaches in South Carolina’s low country earlier this year: More woodpeckers of every variety, size and hue can be found within the boundaries of Skidaway Island State Park than we’ve seen anywhere else in the U.S.
Red-headed Woodpeckers like this one are as common as sparrows. We spotted one and sometimes two toward the top of every other tall dead tree around the park. The haunting calls of Pileated Woodpeckers added a constant trill to the daily soundtrack. Red-bellied, Downy and Hairy Woodpeckers along with their cousins — the magnificently adorned Northern Flicker, pictured left, made constant appearances.
It was an all-star cast, and it happens to top the list of my favorite birds.
That’s in part because woodpeckers are so full of action: They spend their days so often in the open, inching up and down trunks and along branches, digging in and under bark and roots, drumming their signature beats that double as foraging tools and communication signals.
It’s also because the story of their evolution over millions of years is especially impressive: how they’ve gradually equipped themselves with pecking skills, chisels for beaks, feet designed for defying gravity and skulls padded to withstand endless pounding that no other species has to endure. Today, this means they are among the most rewarding birds to watch and photograph because you can follow them for hours, often in clear view, and feast your eyes on their relentless work.
This package is part of our annual series of the best posts from the past year. This originally ran on Sept. 26 after a meandering trip up and down the Atlantic coast. Each Sunday, we’ll bring back one of the most popular posts of 2024, which will include stories on pelicans, coastal birds, the Resplendent Quetzal and others. Thank you for reading Flying Lessons. We wish you the best as December winds down and a bird-rich year ahead.
They’re just about everywhere
Twenty-three species of woodpeckers are spread throughout North America. The most plentiful overlap in many places. Northern Flickers are common all over the U.S., Canada and Central America. Red-bellied Woodpeckers — with the largest woodpecker population estimated at about 16 million — are found over the eastern half of the U.S. Hairy Woodpeckers are all across the hemisphere, as are Downy Woodpeckers, the smallest of the bunch. A few species are in trouble, including the Red-cockaded Woodpecker (whose recovery story we tell in detail in “A Wing and a Prayer: The Race to Save our Vanishing Birds”), and the Ivory-billed Woodpecker (another character in our book) that’s either extinct or perilously close.
But walking through Skidaway Island State Park, a little east of Savanna, is like returning to a time before the decline of so many species began in earnest. It’s especially delightful to discover all these woodpecker species in a single location.
It’s not hard to see why they congregate here, along the coast of the Intracoastal Waterway, amid maritime forests and marshy swamplands. The region buzzes with insects, and it’s dotted with towering dead trees, pock-marked with the cavities of current and past generations of woodpeckers. There’s no housing shortage here.
Here’s a gallery of just some of the birds we spent our days with:
Check out the introduction of our book, “A Wing and a Prayer: The Race to Save our Vanishing Bird,” posted here thanks to Simon and Schuster. It’s part adventure story, part detective tale about the people determined to confront the loss of a third of North America’s bird species.
Woodpeckers are a kind of “poster bird”
By the time we left Skidaway, I’d come to think of this park and the surrounding waterways and marshes as part of a lesson these birds are teaching us.
It doesn’t take all that much to live side by side with these creatures that were here long before humans. If we’ll leave the habitat we share close to its native state, this provides not only a beautiful setting for people but a place where birds can thrive. Among the best examples of this are letting dead trees stand so they can provide homes for birds and other wildlife, and eventually die and finally collapse, each stage of which plays important roles in the cycles of nature.
This kind of habitat can work right alongside of the development that is going to continue around such high population areas as Savannah. Skidaway isn’t a wilderness, but by taking a few simple steps to preserve the natural state, we can coexist with precious birds like these woodpeckers.
Here are a few of our favorite woodpeckers from elsewhere around the hemisphere:
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