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Syrian Woodpecker | Dendrocopos syriacus
Syrische bonte specht | Pico sirio | Blutspecht | נקר סורי | Pic syriaque
The pied woodpecker of orchards, village edges and town parks, from south-east Europe to the Iranian plateau. It looks much like a Great Spotted Woodpecker and likes human company, living among walnuts, mulberries and old standard fruit trees. In the last century its range shifted far to the north-west, as far as central Europe.
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Voice
The call is a soft, slightly muffled kyuk, less sharp and explosive than the kik! of Great Spotted, running into a rattling kwirrr when the bird is disturbed. The drum roll is noticeably longer and fades away at the end, where Great Spotted stops abruptly. Males drum from January into April, often from a dead orchard branch or a roadside pole.
Recording: András Schmidt — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Identification
The same size as Great Spotted Woodpecker, with a longer bill and a white, open face. The black moustache curves back and dies away in the white of the neck side: there is no black band running on to the nape, so cheek and neck form one unbroken white sweep. The underparts are dingy white to buff, on many birds with faint flank streaks, and the vent is dull pink rather than scarlet. The outer tail feathers show little or no white. Males have a red nape patch, females no red, juveniles a black-edged red cap.
Confusion species
Great Spotted Woodpecker is the comparison that matters: on it the black moustache runs unbroken to the nape and cuts the white face into pieces, the underparts are clean white, the vent vivid red and the outer tail clearly barred white. Middle Spotted Woodpecker has a red crown in both sexes with no black border and a salmon-pink lower belly. Lesser Spotted is sparrow-sized with a barred back. Where the two large species meet, hybrids occur; a bird with half a moustachial band is best left unnamed.
Habitat
Half-open wooded farmland: standard orchards, walnut and mulberry trees along roads, gardens, cemeteries, village edges and town parks, and olive groves further south. Closed forest it avoids. It needs isolated old trees with soft, decaying wood to excavate a nest hole, and in autumn wedges nuts and stones into a regular anvil.
Where the bird is most at home, classified with EUNIS — the European standard for habitats.
Range and movements
From south-east Europe and Anatolia through the Levant and Mesopotamia to the Caucasus and the Iranian plateau. Since the late nineteenth century the range has shifted far to the north-west, across the Balkans, the Pannonian plain and the Carpathians into central Europe; since about 2000 that western front has been more or less static on a line from the Oder through Bohemia to the eastern edge of the Alps.
- Resident
- Breeding (summer)
- Winter
- Passage
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
Look for it in the village, not the wood. On the Pannonian plain or in the Balkans, spend a March morning walking a street of old walnut trees, the edge of an orchard or a cemetery, and listen for the soft kyuk and a drum roll that runs on a shade too long. When a pied woodpecker appears, check the side of the neck first, then the vent.
Conservation status
Not threatened (IUCN: Least Concern) and common over most of its range. At the western front the spread has stalled since the turn of the century and numbers are falling locally, most likely because old standard orchards and solitary walnut trees are disappearing. One possible measure is keeping old fruit and nut trees in and around villages.
Scientific name
Dendrocopos syriacus | (Hemprich & Ehrenberg, 1833)
Hemprich & Ehrenberg described the species in 1833 as Picus syriacus; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Dendrocopos was introduced in 1816 by Koch. Dendrocopos is Greek, from dendron 'tree' and kopos 'striking'. syriacus is Latin for 'Syrian'; the type specimen came from Mount Lebanon, then counted as part of Syria. The specimen the first description was based on came from Mount Lebanon.