Bird of the Month: Yellow-bellied Sapsucker
Common Nighthawk. Photo by Jeff Bryant.
By Roger Digges, CCAS Vice-President
When I first heard the name of this month’s bird, long before I’d been introduced to birding, I thought it was a joke. What kind of bird sucks sap? And “yellow-bellied” just added to the hilarity of it. But indeed, as I would discover for myself, there really are woodpeckers with bellies that look like they’ve been water-colored yellow, and which really do suck sap.
Unlike the other six species of the woodpecker family that can be found in our area, Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers do not live here year-round. Because they nest hundreds of miles north of Champaign County, we don’t see them from when they migrate north in the spring until they migrate south in September and October. Nor, like Red-headed Woodpeckers, are they common during the winter when sap tends to be pretty hard for them to access. So now is a great time to look for them.
But where do you find sapsuckers? They might visit your yard, although I’ve only observed 7 of these birds in our yard over the past 20 years, each time at our suet feeder. However if you are fortunate enough to have young birch or maple trees in your neighborhood, you might see a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker creating a sap well, usually one of a horizontal line of deep holes, or maybe several such lines in a well-used tree. But if these unusual woodpeckers won’t come to you, go to them. Visit a forest, especially a young forest with birches or maples or beech trees, and look for sap wells. Or listen for the bird’s call, which has been described as “a scratchy nasal mewing.” (The Merlin app can help you identify its call.)
How do you know if the bird you see is a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker? If you spot a medium-sized woodpecker with a long, sturdy bill (good for drilling sap wells); a red crown on top of its head and a red throat if it’s a male; and a long, bright white vertical stripe along its wings when it is working on a tree, it almost certainly is a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker. If you have a good look, you may also spy that yellow wash on its belly that gives the bird its name.
While Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers do enjoy the high sugar content of sap, which provides them energy, like virtually all land birds, they also need the protein that insects provide. So you may see them foraging under the bark of trees like any other woodpecker, probing for ants or maybe beetles. Sapsuckers will even sometimes perch at the very tip of a branch, then launch out into the open to snag a tasty insect morsel just like a flycatcher.
How are yellow-bellied sapsuckers doing? Amazingly well. Their numbers continue to increase, so much so that some avian biologists maintain that there more of these birds now than there were when Europeans first arrived in North America, because the old growth forests that existed then have been replaced by the younger woodlands that sapsuckers prefer. We can still help them by planting or encouraging the planting of young maples and other young trees.
If you’d like help to find this unusual woodpecker, try participating in one of the Champaign County Audubon Society’s Sunday morning bird walks early in October (or late in September). We gather on Sunday mornings in the Anita Purves Nature Center parking lot (1505 N. Broadway, Urbana). You don’t need to have any experience. We have a great leader and other capable birders to help you identify the sapsucker or any other bird. If you have binoculars, bring them. If you don’t, we’ll provide. And it’s free.
