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Iberian Green Woodpecker | Picus sharpei
Iberische groene specht | Pito ibérico | Iberiengrünspecht | נקר ירוק איברי | Pic de Sharpe
The woodpecker of almost the whole Iberian peninsula, where it replaces European Green Woodpecker. Treated as a separate species since 2011, it differs above all in its grey, all but maskless face.
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Voice
A loud laugh like that of European Green Woodpecker, but faster, sharper and a shade higher: kyu-kyu-kyu-kyu, falling in pitch and fading at the end. Heard all year, loudest from February to May. It drums little, and then briefly and softly; in flight a hard kyuk.
Recording: Esperanza Poveda — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Identification
Large and heavily built, olive green above with a contrasting yellow-green rump and off-white, unmarked underparts. The crown is red back to the nape, but the face is grey: around the pale eye there is at most a dusky ring, never a black mask. The male's moustache is wholly red with a hair-thin black edge, the female's dark grey. The undertail coverts are all but unbarred. Flight heavy and deeply undulating.
Confusion species
European Green Woodpecker overlaps only in the Pyrenees and the extreme north-east; it frames the pale eye in black, shows the male's red moustache inside a broad black surround, and has clearly barred undertail coverts. In the narrow contact zone intermediate birds occur that cannot always be named. Within the peninsula itself there is no other large Green Woodpecker to confuse it with.
Habitat
Every wooded and half-open landscape of the peninsula: dehesa with scattered holm and cork oaks, thinned pine woods, oak and chestnut forest, riverside gallery woodland, and parks and large gardens right into the city. It always needs short turf, bare ground or ant hills within reach and mature trees to excavate. From sea level well up into the mountains.
Where the bird is most at home, classified with EUNIS — the European standard for habitats.
Range and movements
Almost the whole Iberian peninsula from the Atlantic coast to Catalonia, plus a narrow band north of the Pyrenees from the Aude to the Pyrénées-Atlantiques. Absent from the Balearics and the Canaries. It is the commonest woodpecker of Iberia and scarce only in the treeless parts of Extremadura, the Ebro valley and the Levante coast. In north-western Europe it does not occur. Resident.
- Resident
- Breeding (summer)
- Passage
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
Any trip to Iberia will produce it: walk a dehesa or an open pine wood early in March or April and follow the laugh to the tree. In the parks of Madrid and Lisbon it feeds on the lawns. On every bird check the cheek: grey without a black mask is the feature that counts. Take care in the Pyrenees, where European Green Woodpecker also occurs.
Conservation status
Not globally threatened (IUCN: Least Concern). Common and widespread, with no serious threats. In the most treeless districts it is declining as veteran trees go and dehesa is turned to arable, while afforestation and scrubbing-up abandoned farmland give it ground elsewhere. Clearing old and dead trees from parks and dehesas costs it nest holes locally.
Scientific name
Picus sharpei | (Saunders, 1872)
Saunders described the species in 1872 as Gecinus sharpei; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Picus was introduced in 1758 by Linnaeus. Picus is the Latin word for 'woodpecker' and also the name of Picus, in Roman mythology the first king of Latium, who was turned into a woodpecker by the sorceress Circe. sharpei honours the English zoologist Richard Bowdler Sharpe (1847–1909), curator of the bird collection at the British Museum. The specimen the first description was based on came from Spain south of the Guadarrama.