The Red-headed Woodpecker

The woodpecker is one of the easiest birds to identify in the bush. Both adults are identical, with three distinct colours, red, black and white. The red head, neck and upper breast make it recognizable even to very young children. Like the chickadee, it will often land near humans and continue to peck away for insects almost impervious to bystanders.

Anything for Breakfast

The red-headed woodpecker will eat ants, wasps, beetles, grasshoppers, crickets, moths, butterflies, spiders and caterpillars. It can even catch moths and butterflies on the wing. The bird also has the less endearing habit of killing and eating the young of other birds' nests. This predation is outweighed by the huge numbers of insects that make up the major part of the diet and the many trees which are saved from insect destruction.

A hundred years ago the woodpecker was the subject of extermination attempts by farmers because of its attraction to fresh fruit. They are particularly adept at stripping a cherry tree. It is estimated that forty percent of a woodpecker's diet consists of corn, cherries, grapes, apples, acorns, beechnuts and all types of berries.

Dining manners

Woodpeckers are squirrel-like in the way they store nuts and seeds in cracks and holes of trees as a winter larder. They often fly to a favourite stump where they take their beetles, weevils and grasshoppers and wedge them into holes while still very much alive. The tree stump serves as a chopping block on which these insects are chopped and the soft parts removed to feed to the young woodpeckers. These stumps are often covered with grasshopper and cricket wings and legs. The red-headed woodpecker has an extraordinary capacity for judging the size of such a crack and with its bill, jamming the hapless insect tightly into the wood as a future food source.

The Noisy Chiselers

The red-headed woodpecker is only one of 22 different kinds of woodpeckers, the largest of which is the pileated. But they all peck wood. The red-headed woodpecker can be heard most days, summer and winter with the familiar "rat-atat-tat" in bush lots. Why do the woodpeckers peck? Wouldn't it be easier to catch grubs, insects, moths and butterflies on the wing and on the ground as do other birds?

Specialized high-speed drilling apparatus

The red-headed woodpecker is specially designed for what it does - peck holes in trees. The following is a list of its specialized equipment:

l. Thick Skull - a very important detail. How long could the woodpecker peck without scrambling its brains if unprotected from all the jarring? So, appropriately, the brain is housed in a specially ribbed skull, reinforced with tiny crossbraces to protect the brain.

2. Specialized tongue - to snake out insects. The tongue goes under the jaw, over the head and into the right nostril (leaving the left one free for breathing). In some species of woodpeckers the tongue is barbed and coated with a sticky substance which serves to fish out the insects.

3. A powerful beak - able to hit trees without wearing out at 100 shots a minute.

4. Special connective tissues - to serve as a shock absorber to cushion the blows between the beak and skull, and not found in other birds.

5. Tough neck muscles - all that banging requires a super support system. The red-headed woodpecker has just the right muscle placement and strength to deliver furious Jack-hammer blows.

6. Short powerful legs - unlike the spindly legs of other birds such as the robin. The legs of the woodpecker are positioned just right so that maximum leverage can be utilized to hit the tree hard enough to chip out wood.

7. Vise-like toes - two in front, two in back, to grasp the rough bark of trees.

8. Specialized tail feathers - terminating in sharp barbs to serve as a tripod or prop against trees.

Pecking holes in the theory of evolution

Evolutionists have great difficulty in accounting for all of these special features. It is argued by them that these could only have occurred over large periods of time and very gradually when these did occur. (If the changes occurred just by chance suddenly, then of course these could be observed in the animal and bird world today, or demonstrated by fast multiplying insects such as the fruit fly in the laboratory, but there is a total lack of experimental evidence).

Could the red-headed woodpecker have evolved from gradual changes over thousands/millions of years? Let's suppose, by chance, a bird that was to become the ancestor of today's woodpecker developed an ideal beak for pecking trees, but (since changes occur gradually) lacked the necessary connective tissue, skull protection and muscle attachment - of what value would the specialized beak be to the woodpecker to-be? Similarly, suppose the woodpecker evolved by chance, the appropriate woodpecker-like beak, connective tissue to serve as shock absorber, muscle attachment, and cranial protection, but lacked the other special features. Would the "evolved" features enable it to survive better than birds which did not, and still do not, peck trees? How would the bird know where to peck? How would the grubs be retrieved, even if they could be located, unless a suitable tongue had evolved too? How would the bird fasten to trees since the legs, vise-like toes and barbed tail as yet had not evolved?

In other words, the woodpecker pecks gaping, holes in the theorv of evolution since all of the special features of the woodpecker would have to have evolved at the same time for the woodpecker to survive as a woodpecker. If all of these features appeared suddenly, then of course, they could not have evolved over long periods of time.

Ron Abel