Red-Cockaded Woodpecker

Yes. Red-cockaded woodpeckers do everything differently from every other woodpecker in North Louisiana, and the list of differences reads like a species that deliberately chose the hardest possible path through the evolutionary landscape. In North Louisiana, the species' stronghold sits in the longleaf pine forests of Kisatchie National Forest in Vernon Parish, where U.S. Red-cockaded woodpeckers are longleaf pine specialists in a way that no other North Louisiana bird species matches.

Red-cockaded woodpeckers are small — about 8 inches long, roughly cardinal-sized, with a wingspan of 14 to 15 inches and a weight of 1.4 to 2 ounces. The plumage is a crisp black-and-white arrangement: black cap, black nape, bold white cheek patches, and a black-and-white barred ("ladder-backed") pattern on the back and wings. Underparts run white to grayish-white with black spots on the breast sides that transition to bars on the flanks. The overall impression — black cap, white cheek, barred back — looks clean, sharp, and distinctive enough to separate the species from the red-bellied, downy, and hairy woodpeckers that share its habitat. The "cockade" that gives the species its name is a tiny cluster of red feathers on the male, located at the upper edge of the white cheek patch, between the black cap and the cheek. Alexander Wilson named the species in the early 1800s when "cockade" referred to a ribbon or ornament worn on a hat as a badge, and the comparison works — but only if you can see the red, which in practice you almost never can. Red cockade is so small, so rarely displayed (it appears mainly when the male is agitated or excited), and so thoroughly concealed beneath the black crown feathers that field identification never relies on the red. You identify red-cockaded woodpeckers by habitat (open pine forest with minimal understory), behavior (cooperative groups, live-tree cavity sites with resin flowing down the trunk), size (small), and the distinctive white cheek — not by the cockade that nobody can see.

What They Eat

Red-cockaded woodpeckers forage primarily on the trunks and large limbs of living pine trees, scaling bark and probing crevices to extract ants, beetles, cockroaches, caterpillars, wood-boring insect larvae, spiders, and other arthropods. Unlike pileated and hairy woodpeckers that excavate deep into dead wood for wood-boring prey, red-cockaded woodpeckers rarely excavate for food — their foraging technique involves gleaning from bark surfaces and probing into bark fissures rather than hammering into solid wood.

This surface-foraging strategy is reflected in the species' bill morphology: the red-cockaded's bill is relatively long and slender compared to the heavy, chisel-shaped bills of woodpeckers that specialize in deep excavation. Foraging occurs on both live and dead pines within the territory, with the birds working their way up trunks and along large branches in a pattern similar to brown creepers and nuthatches. Group members forage together, maintaining contact through soft chortling calls that keep the family unit coordinated as the birds spread across several trees.

Males tend to forage higher on tree trunks and on limbs than females — a vertical niche partition that reduces competition between the sexes within a group and may reflect subtle bill-length differences between males and females. Pine forests maintained by frequent prescribed fire support higher arthropod abundance in the bark and on the ground surface than fire-suppressed forests, so fire management for red-cockaded woodpecker habitat simultaneously improves the food supply that sustains the birds.

An open pine savanna with grassy understory, widely spaced mature trees, and abundant bark-dwelling arthropods provides optimal foraging conditions — a habitat structure that only exists when fire occurs frequently enough to prevent hardwood invasion and dense understory development. Wild fruits, berries, seeds, and pine mast supplement the insect diet, particularly during fall and winter when arthropod availability drops, but insects dominate the year-round diet and account for the majority of nestling provisioning during the breeding season.

No. This species is not dangerous to people when it is observed without handling or disturbance