Three-toed woodpecker - Picoides tridactylus

Appearance.

Medium size (larger than a starling). The top of the neck, back, wings, tail and spots on the sides are black, the underside of the body, spots on the back, wings, tail and stripes on the sides of the head are white. The top of the male's head is golden-yellow, while the female's is dirty whitish. There are 3 toes on the paw.

Lifestyle.

Inhabits dense coniferous forests on plains and mountains. A fairly common resident bird. The nest is placed in a hollow, the entrance to the hollow is round, a clutch of 3-6 white eggs is laid in May - June. It is more secretive than other woodpeckers, alone and in pairs. Silent, the voice is a sharp monosyllabic cry.

It feeds on insects and their larvae (mainly bark beetles). It differs from other woodpeckers in having a yellow or white top of the head and three toes on the paw.

Reference books by geographer and traveler V.E. Flint, R.L. Boehme, Yu.V. Kostin, A.A. Kuznetsov. Birds of the USSR. Publishing house "Mysl" Moscow, edited by prof. G.P. Dementieva. Image: “Three-toed Woodpecker - Finlandia 0005 (3)” by Francesco Veronesi from Italy - Three-toed Woodpecker - Finlandia 0005 (3). Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 from Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Three-toed_Woodpecker_-_Finlandia_0005_(3).jpg #/media/File:Three-toed_Woodpecker_-_Finlandia_0005_(3). jpg

The three-toed woodpecker, or yellow-headed woodpecker (lat. Picoides tridactylus) is a bird of the woodpecker family.

A small bird with a rather large head and a sharp beak; slightly smaller than the Great Spotted Woodpecker, but half as large as the Lesser Spotted Woodpecker. Length 21-24 cm, wingspan 33-37 cm, weight 50-90 g. The plumage is black and white, but from the outside it looks rather dark due to the predominantly black sides and wings. The red markings on the head and undertail, characteristic of other woodpeckers, are absent. Instead, the male and young birds of both sexes have a lemon-yellow cap on the crown, while the female has a silver-gray cap with dark streaks. On the sides of the head there are alternating black and white stripes, one of which forms narrow “whiskers” from the corner of the beak, and the second stretches from the eye and descends along the side of the neck. A white stripe runs along the back from the neck to the rump - clearly visible in most forms and poorly developed in the subspecies alpinus, which inhabits the mountains of Central Europe. The lower part is whitish with dark longitudinal, transverse or V-shaped markings; the intensity of these marks decreases from west to east and from north to south. There are 3 toes on the foot - two pointing forward and one pointing back. The fourth finger is reduced. The flight is fast and straight. The distribution area is a strip of coniferous and mixed forests of Eurasia from Scandinavia and Central Europe east to Kamchatka, Sakhalin, Hokkaido and the Korean Peninsula. Inhabits mature coniferous and mixed forests of the taiga type, often depressed or dead. In Central and Eastern Europe, it settles in mountainous forested areas between 650 and 1900 m above sea level, choosing inaccessible slopes covered with coniferous trees - spruce, pine, European cedar, or semi-marsh areas with ash and alder, as well as oak. hornbeam groves. In northern Europe it nests in mature and overmature forests dominated by spruce and fir. In Siberia it is common in continuous dark coniferous taiga and larch forests. Everywhere it prefers low-lying flooded areas of the old forest, where there are many sick and dead trees. Often found in burnt areas, clearings, and along the edges of swamps. It feeds on insects, mainly larvae and pupae of xylophages. Among the beetles, bark beetles and longhorned beetles predominate; to a lesser extent, they feed on leaf beetles, golden beetles, weevils, ground beetles, pied beetles, narrow beetles and some others. Of the moths, it eats the larvae of cutworms, moths, leaf rollers and wood borers. In addition to those that feed on wood, it sometimes eats other invertebrates - ants, spiders, stoneflies, grasshoppers, flies, bees, even mollusks. From plant foods it feeds on tree sap and occasionally eats rowan berries. Doesn't hit any bumps. They most often obtain food from under the bark of trees, sometimes managing to strip a large spruce tree in a day, where up to 10 thousand bark beetle larvae can hide. In summer it also often catches openly crawling insects. Less often, it chisels rotten wood or scours the surface of trunks and branches. If the tree is not completely cleaned at one time, return to it the next day. After the snow melts, he examines the branches and rotten stumps covered with moss lying on the ground. It very rarely collects food on the surface of the ground. It usually feeds at a height of 1-3 m from the ground, giving preference to dead trees, often leaning or lying on their sides. During the nesting period, males, on average, forage somewhat lower than females, preferring stumps and choosing larger trunks. On the other hand, females sometimes feed on living trees.

According to the classification of endangered species, the three-toed woodpecker is in the LC category - the risk of extinction is minimal.

In general, the three-toed woodpecker is a rare bird listed in the Red Book of the Moscow region. This is due to the fact that it prefers to live in dark coniferous forests (mainly spruce), so here we have it on the border of its range. Although if you take its entire range, it is quite wide and occupies a huge area from Western Europe to Kamchatka. But despite this, the population density of this woodpecker is quite low everywhere, because He likes a secluded lifestyle, without many competitors.

So imagine the Moscow region. There are only a few forests left here, so give this comrade some spruce forests, withered ones and more xylophages (bark beetles). So our region cannot boast of a large number of them, unlike, say, the BPD. The Red Book of the Moscow Region says that their number in the region is estimated at approximately 1000 pairs. Moreover, most of them live in the area of ​​the Klinsko-Dmitrovskaya ridge. And in the south of the region and in the near Moscow region it is especially rare.

In connection with the above, every meeting of a three-toed animal on Elk Island was an event for me. I was especially happy when V.V. Solodushkin found its nest here in 2011. Apparently, this was the first recorded woodpecker nesting on Elk Island.

The range of the three-toed woodpecker includes a large territory of Russia.

A small analysis showed that the nesting of the woodpecker on Losiny Island coincided with the beginning of a great disaster for our forests - the invasion of the typograph bark beetle. Many old spruce forests in the region died, some of them fell under sanitary felling. There is a lot of information about this on the Internet. The outbreak of bark beetle numbers is linked to the drought of 2010, when the entire region was in smoke and fires.

Biotope of the three-toed woodpecker in Elk Island

But for some it’s misfortune, and for others it’s their daily bread. So this winter, in the dried-up spruce forests there was simply a festival of woodpeckers: the common woodpecker, the white-backed woodpecker, the BPD and, of course, the three-toed woodpecker. With such an abundance of food, it’s not a sin to nest. And nested. In general, I won’t muddy the waters; I found two nests on Elk Island. I watched them all June. The chicks successfully hatched and left their home. It must be said that two nests on Losiny Island, located a kilometer from each other, are good, this means the birds are comfortable here. I decided to present the details of the observations and specific ornithological information about nesting in the form of an article in the magazine “Moskovka”, if anyone is interested, read it.

Besides me, three-toed nests were found this year victor_tyakht And a_nikoros . If anyone else has found it in the Moscow region, write, I will consolidate the data in one article.

In general, one of the nests was at a surprisingly low height and convenient for photography - exactly 1 m. I wanted to film how they feed the adult chicks so that they stick out of the hollow. But I didn’t calculate the departure date and the chicks flew out before I tried to carry out my plan.

What did I take away from my observations? Birds replace each other during incubation. The male often fed the chicks. When worried, the male makes sounds similar to the sounds of anxiety of the BPD, I have not heard this from Veprintsev. Hollows are built strictly in dry trees, not necessarily in spruces, but also in pine and aspen.

Well, here are some photos from observations of their life (mostly on weekends).

Incubation stage. The female replaces the male.

When feeding very small chicks, woodpeckers climb into the hollow with their heads.

The female brought food.

Male at the nest

The male takes out dust and sawdust from the nest

Yummy

See you in Elk Island.

• Class: Aves = Birds
• Order: Picariae, Piciformes = Woodpeckers, woodpeckers
• Suborder: Galbulae = Jacamaras, primitive woodpeckers
• Family: Picidae = Woodpeckers
• Species: Picoides arcticus = Black-backed three-toed woodpecker

Species: Picoides tridactylus Linnaeus = Three-toed woodpecker

This woodpecker has three-toed legs - hence its name. Of the three fingers, two point forward and one points backward, although it can also turn to the side. The three-toed woodpecker is close in size to the thrush. The main color background is black and white, over which a transverse pattern is scattered on the sides, and sometimes on the abdomen. The undertail and upper back of the three-toed woodpecker are white. There are differences in the coloring of males and females, i.e. sexual dimorphism is noted. So, in males the crown is golden in color, while in females it is white with dark streaks. The male's beautiful golden-yellow cap consists of shiny narrow feathers, which he often lifts with a ruff. The three-toed woodpecker appears darker than other pileated woodpeckers, especially in flight. And his flight is fast and straightforward.

The three-toed woodpecker is distributed throughout almost the entire forest zone of Russia, but it is more numerous in the north of its range. It prefers to settle in dense dark coniferous forests, where it mainly feeds on tree insects. The three-toed woodpecker does not go south into deciduous forests. Therefore, in the European part of Russia it does not nest south of the Moscow region and the coniferous forests of the southern Urals. In Siberia, its range extends across the taiga region, including Kamchatka and Sakhalin. This woodpecker is found in Western Europe and in the north of the American continent, and in the south of the Asian part of its range it penetrates into Mongolia and Dzungaria.

The three-toed woodpecker nests in coniferous and mixed forests, where in the spring you can hear its quiet and short drum trill. To build a nest, he chooses shady and damp places, sometimes even swamps. It has also been noticed that the three-toed woodpecker is even more willing to settle in fires and burnt-out areas, which is due to the presence of a large number of dead trees in such forest areas.

The three-toed woodpecker makes its nest in tree hollows, like other woodpeckers. For this purpose, he most often chooses dry, rotten spruce trunks, placing the hollows at a height of 1-6 m from the ground.

In the nest of a three-toed woodpecker you can often find very abundant litter, the layer thickness of which can reach up to 60 mm. The diameter of the hollow used for arranging the nest in the three-toed woodpecker can range from 60-140 mm, the depth of the hollow is 200-300 mm. At the same time, its entrance size is smaller than that of the Great Spotted Woodpecker.

The mating season for the three-toed woodpecker occurs in mid-spring, and females usually lay eggs in May. The clutch usually consists of 3-5 white eggs, the sizes of which vary within the following limits: (21-28) x (16-19) mm. Incubation of eggs and feeding of chicks occurs in June and the first half of July. Young birds flying out of the hollow can be observed from the second half of July. By the end of August - beginning of September, the young not only lead an independent life, but by this time they already have time to molt and change their nesting plumage to adult plumage.

The three-toed woodpecker is a sedentary bird, which is one of our most useful birds inhabiting coniferous forests. Due to the fact that, unlike other insectivorous species, the three-toed woodpecker does not fly away for the winter, it diligently destroys forest pests all year round.

When not nesting, three-toed woodpeckers stay solitary, leisurely fly from tree to tree, search the bark of coniferous and deciduous trees, and crush soft rotten wood. In the fall, you can quite often see up to a dozen three-toed woodpeckers at a time, silently flying from tree to tree, never uttering a cry.

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