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Pileated Woodpecker | Dryocopus pileatus

Noord-Amerikaanse helmspecht | Picamaderos norteamericano

The Pileated Woodpecker is the largest woodpecker confirmed to still occur in North America: a mostly black bird the size of a crow, with a flaming red crest and broad white stripes down the neck. It chisels long, rectangular holes in dead trees in search of carpenter ants.

Pileated Woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus) — Photo: Cephas — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Voice

The call is a loud, rapidly repeated series, kuk-kuk-kuk-kuk, recalling the Northern Flicker's call but heavier and more far-carrying. It drums slowly and irregularly, with heavy, far-carrying strikes that betray the presence of a large cavity.

Listen: DrummingXC241106

Recording: Jonathon Jongsma — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Forestville/Mystery Cave State Park, Fillmore County, Minnesota, United States · xeno-canto

Identification

A large, mostly black woodpecker with a long red crest, a white stripe running from the bill to the neck, and white underwing stripes clearly visible in flight. The male shows a red moustache stripe, the female a black one. The bill is long, heavy and chisel-shaped.

Confusion species

The extinct Ivory-billed Woodpecker had a similar pattern but carried white on the trailing edge of the wing rather than only on the neck, and had a pale rather than black bill; no confirmed recent record of that species exists. The much smaller Northern Flicker gives a similar call but lacks the crest and is mostly brown.

Habitat

Forest with large, old and dead trees, both deciduous and mixed or coniferous, from the eastern lowlands to the western mountains and the coastal forests of the Great Lakes and Canada.

Where the bird is most often found, arranged by the USNVC — the vegetation classification of the United States and Canada — and CMECS for sea and coast.

Range and movements

Resident across nearly all of the eastern United States and Canada, from the Gulf Coast to the boreal forest, and in a separate band along the Pacific coast from British Columbia to California.

Resident
Breeding (summer)
Winter
Passage
dark = core range, pale = thinly spread

The map is a density field, not a drawn range boundary: it is built from the records themselves and therefore does not follow state or national borders. Both the seasonal colour and the depth of colour come, cell by cell, from the records of GBIF (2006–2026), counted per 0,7° cell and divided by all bird records in that same cell, so that the density of birdwatchers does not count. Every cell is counted separately for June–July, December–January and the migration months, and takes the colour of the season that wins there; a cell is only called summer or winter where the other season is nearly empty. Country outlines: Natural Earth (public domain).

Where and when to look

Look for large, oblong holes in dead tree trunks from eye level up to several metres high; the bird itself more often reveals itself through its loud call than through sight.

Conservation

Widespread and not threatened; the species benefits from standing dead wood in maturing forest. Its abandoned nest cavities are reused by many other animals, from owls to squirrels.

Scientific name

Dryocopus pileatus | (Linnaeus, 1758)

Linnaeus described the species in 1758 as Picus pileatus; because it has since been moved to another genus, author and year stand in parentheses. Dryocopus is Greek for 'tree-striker', from drys ('tree') and kopos ('to strike'); pileatus is Latin for 'capped', after the prominent crest.