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Building a Home – The Nesting Cavities of the Red-cockaded Woodpecker

Nancy Nan

February 1, 2025

Welcome back to our bird of the year, the Red-cockaded Woodpecker! If you needed a little refresher on who our bird is, here’s an amazing picture of one in its natural pine ecosystems.

Now, one of the most fascinating things about our bird of the year is its unique nest/cavity construction behavior. Unlike other woodpeckers who bore their cavities from dead trees, the Red-cockaded Woodpecker is the only one that excavates live, mature pine trees! The NC Wildlife Resources Commission explains that this preference for live trees may be an adaptation “in response to living in a fire maintained ecosystem where frequent fires, primarily in the growing season, eliminated most standing dead pines (snags).”

Often, the bird prefers trees that are over 60 years old and infected with red heart fungus, pictured below. These two factors soften the heartwood of the tree and make the carving process a little easier.

 

 

The excavation process can take several months to years to complete. Once an entrance hole and heartwood cavity is big enough for the breeding pair and additional “helper birds” in the colony, the cavity can be used by multiple generations of woodpeckers.

The longleaf pine is the preferred species for such cavities, though the Red-cockaded Woodpecker is also seen to use loblolly, shortleaf, slash and pond pine, depending on the availability. As longleaf pines are the most fire adapted of the pines, this favoritism for the tree makes sense! Furthermore, these trees produce more resin than other pines. The Red-cockaded Woodpecker uses this resin production to good advantage. They make resin wells – holes that the bird pecks around the entrance so that they fill with resin – that protect predators against their cavities.

The cavities made by the Red-cockaded Woodpecker are not only important for this bird’s survival, but they are also key to the survival of many others species. These cavities provide nesting sites for bluebirds and wood ducks, reptiles and amphibians, and over 35 animal species. Over its lifetime, the cavity will service all different sizes and shapes of animals as the cavity slowly decays and grows bigger over the decades. Furthermore, it was determined that when Red-cockaded Woodpeckers are introduced into a habitat it wasn’t in before, the abundance of other cavity nesting species increases. In fact, this is the reason why the Red-cockaded Woodpecker is considered an important keystone species in pine ecosystems, and why its conservation is so vital for the pinewoods it resides in.

I hope you learned more about the survival of these beautiful birds, through conservation and cavity-building, and I hope to see you at our next blog!