Ladder-backed Woodpecker

About the Ladder-backed Woodpecker

The Ladder-backed Woodpecker is the desert country woodpecker of Texas - a small, busy bird whose crisply barred black-and-white back gives it both its name and its field mark. Males add a red crown; females wear plain black. Where oaks and tall timber give way to mesquite, yucca, and cactus, this is the woodpecker you will find.

It is built for small wood. Rather than hammering big trunks, Ladder-backs work the thin branches of mesquite and hackberry, agave stalks, fence posts, and even big cactus, probing crevices and flaking bark for beetle larvae, ants, and caterpillars. Pairs often forage together, keeping contact with a sharp "pik" call and a descending whinny.

Nest cavities go into whatever the desert offers - a dead mesquite limb, a utility pole, a yucca flower stalk - excavated fresh each season and later recycled by other cavity nesters, making the species a small landlord of the brush country.

Across the western two-thirds of Texas this is a year-round neighbor, as at home in a Hill Country draw or a Panhandle shelterbelt as in the big South Texas thorn scrub.