On the plate, a flicker clings to the trunk of a dead tree with its tail pressed against the bark, and Audubon’s text begins with a recommendation: “It is generally agreeable to be in the company of individuals who are naturally animated and pleasant.” The bird he then describes is plate 273 in volume IV of the octavo Birds of America, printed in Philadelphia in 1842. The plate legend reads “male and females,” and the Golden-winged Woodpecker of the title is the Northern Flicker of a modern field guide.
What the Golden-winged Woodpecker plate covers
The account is one of the longer ones in the volume, pages 282 to 289, and it runs through courtship, nesting, flight, diet, enemies, flesh, range, and a long anatomical note. It is headed THE GOLDEN-WINGED WOODPECKER, Picus auratus, Linn., and the plate carries the printing credit of J. T. Bowen of Philadelphia, who lithographed and colored the octavo plates. The Commons copy of the plate from the New York Public Library is listed as “Golden-winged Woodpecker. 1. Male. 2. Females.”
Audubon says at the start that the bird has more names than most. The French settlers of Louisiana called it Pigue-bois jaune. Other parts of the Union called it “High-holder, Yucker, and Flicker.” And “being seldom or never graced with the epithet Golden-winged, employed by naturalists,” he writes, it is “one of the most lively of our birds, and is found over the whole of the United States.” The name that stuck is the last of the common ones, which is also the sound he spells for its call.
Audubon’s account, in his own words
The first page sets up the courtship scene that the plate is built around. This is the paragraph on the spring display, transcribed from the 1842 printing:
Several males pursue a female, reach her, and, to prove the force and truth of their love, bow their heads, spread their tail, and move sidewise, backwards and forwards, performing such antics, as might induce any one witnessing them, if not of a most morose temper, to join his laugh to theirs.
(Audubon, The Birds of America, octavo, vol. IV, Philadelphia, 1842, p. 283.)
The account that follows is practical. Once a female has chosen, he says, the pair excavate a hole in a tree trunk together and “work with great industry and apparent pleasure.” Two weeks later the female lays four or six eggs, “the whiteness and transparency of which are doubtless the delight of her heart,” and the pair raise two broods in a season. The egg measures an inch and a twelfth in length and nearly seven-eighths in breadth.
On page 284 he describes the flight as strong, prolonged and straighter than that of any other woodpecker in the country, with numerous wingbeats and short intervals of sailing. Migrations are partial, many birds stay through the winter in the middle districts, and the travellers move by night, which he knew from their note and the whistling of their wings heard from the ground. On landing, “it immediately nods its head, and utters its well-known note, ‘Flicker.’”
His diet notes are specific. The bird picks up beetles, caterpillars, ants and “a grain of corn dropt by a squirrel,” examines dead roots and prostrate logs, and eats apples, grapes, persimmons, dogwood berries and in winter whatever is in the corn-cribs. He says the flesh is eaten by sportsmen in the middle districts and that some birds are sold in New York and Philadelphia, but he finds it “very disagreeable, it having a strong flavour of ants.”
Not everything in the account is cheerful. Raccoons reach into the nest hole with a forefoot and draw out eggs, and sometimes the bird itself, and black snakes take eggs or young. Hawks attack the bird in the air, and Audubon enjoys the sight of a woodpecker escaping by diving into the nearest hole.
The eighteen nestlings
The longest quotation in the account is a notice from a correspondent, Mr. T. MacCulloch, printed on pages 285 to 287. MacCulloch and his brothers had located a flicker’s hole high in a decayed stump and wanted a young bird. When the stump proved too weak to climb they pushed it over, and found eighteen naked nestlings and three eggs among the fragments. They tried to reassemble the nest, and the whole brood was dead on their next visit.
MacCulloch’s explanation for the number is a supposition, and he words it as one: that one of the parents had been shot after the usual eggs were laid, and the survivor took a new mate who added more. Whatever the cause, it is a cautionary tale, and the writer closes it by saying that if the parents returned it was merely to witness the devastation. It is also the passage that makes the “four or six eggs” of the main account look conservative.
The red head of the young bird, and the tongue
Two details in the text deserve a second look. The first is a plumage observation on page 284: the young of the species, he says, often have the whole top of the head tinged with red, which disappears toward winter, leaving only a ring of silky vermilion at the back. He had checked by dissection that the change affects both sexes, and he suspected that many young woodpeckers had been described as new species because of it.
The second is the technical section at the end. Audubon dissected a male preserved in spirits and gives the dimensions of the tongue, 1 inch and 5 twelfths long, with two series of small reversed papillae on the horny tip, and then compares how far the horns of the hyoid bone curve over the skull in different American woodpeckers. In the flicker they reach the base of the right nasal membrane. In the Hairy Woodpecker, which tops his list, they curve around the right orbit.
The Northern Flicker today
The modern name is Colaptes auratus. Birds of the World says the species ranges over most wooded regions of North America and divides it into two groups by the color of the flight feathers, the yellow-shafted flicker of the east and the red-shafted flicker of the west, with a hybrid zone running from the Great Plains through the Canadian Rockies to southern Alaska. Audubon met that boundary in the same volume. Townsend, he writes, saw none near the Columbia, where the flicker is represented by the Red-shafted Woodpecker, which is there “as abundant as the present species is in our Eastern Districts,” and plate 274, on the next page, shows it as a separate species.
The flicker remains abundant, according to Birds of the World, though Breeding Bird Survey data indicate declines, mainly in the southeastern United States. Habitat loss and competition with European Starlings for nesting cavities are named as possible reasons, with the cause described as unclear. The same source stresses that the flicker excavates cavities that other hole-nesters depend on, which makes a change in its numbers matter beyond the species itself, and that it eats mostly ants, with other insect larvae and, from late autumn to early spring, berries. Audubon’s remark about the flavor of the flesh is the other side of the same fact.
The nest cavity is also the reason this page sits beside the site’s birdhouse guide. A species that digs its own hole in dead wood leaves its old holes for others.
How this page’s number works
The 00445 in this address is the site’s own running count of text sections in volume IV. It is not plate 273 or page 282. The woodpecker family begins on page 211 with an entry without a plate, the Imperial Woodpecker, and the count reaches the Golden-winged Woodpecker twenty sections later. The Birds of America overview sets out the volumes, and the Carolina Turtle-Dove page shows the same count in volume V.
The account itself closes with the anatomy rather than with a moral. After the table of hyoid bones, volume IV turns the page to the Red-shafted Woodpecker, which opens with a note from Nuttall about the Mexican Colaptes met along the Platte River and followed, he says, to the shores of the Pacific.
- Audubon, The Birds of America, octavo, vol. IV (Philadelphia, 1842), pp. 282 to 290, Smithsonian Libraries scan
- Wikimedia Commons: octavo plate, Golden-winged Woodpecker, NYPL copy
- Birds of the World (Cornell Lab): Northern Flicker, introduction
- Birds of the World (Cornell Lab): Northern Flicker, conservation
Common questions
What is the Golden-winged Woodpecker in Audubon's Birds of America?
It is the bird now called the Northern Flicker, Colaptes auratus. Audubon listed it as Picus auratus, Linn., and commented that naturalists gave it the epithet golden-winged although it was seldom called that by anyone else. In the octavo it is plate 273 in volume IV, printed in 1842, with the account running from page 282 to page 289.
What other names did Audubon give for the flicker?
He wrote that the French settlers of Louisiana called it Pigue-bois jaune, and that other parts of the Union used High-holder, Yucker and Flicker. The last is the one that survived into the modern name. He also said the bird, on alighting, nods its head and utters its well-known note, "Flicker." The name Golden-winged he put down to naturalists rather than to the people who knew the bird.
How many eggs does the flicker lay, according to Audubon?
Four or six, laid within about two weeks of the pair finishing the nest hole, and he says two broods are raised in a season. He measured an egg at an inch and a twelfth long by nearly seven-eighths of an inch broad. The page also prints a correspondent's story of a nest stump that held eighteen young and three eggs, which the writer explained as the result of one parent having been shot and replaced.
Is the Northern Flicker rare today?
No. Birds of the World says the species remains abundant. It also reports declines in abundance in Breeding Bird Survey data, mainly in the southeastern United States, with habitat loss and competition with European Starlings for nest cavities among the possible explanations, and describes the cause as unclear. Because flickers excavate cavities that other hole-nesting birds later use, the source calls it a keystone species.
Is the Red-shafted Woodpecker a different species?
Audubon treated it as one, in plate 274 of the same volume, naming it Picus mexicanus after Swainson. Birds of the World today treats the yellow-shafted flicker of eastern North America and the red-shafted flicker of the west as two groups of one species, Colaptes auratus, with a hybrid zone running from the Great Plains through the Canadian Rockies to southern Alaska.
What does the Golden-winged Woodpecker eat?
Audubon lists ants and beetles first, then larvae, and says the bird feeds on the ground, where it examines dead roots and logs. He adds apples, grapes, persimmons, dogwood berries and, in winter, corn from the crib. Birds of the World agrees on the main point: the flicker eats mostly ants, with other insect larvae, and berries from late autumn to early spring.
What did Audubon say about eating flickers?
He wrote that sportsmen of the middle states esteemed the flesh and that some birds were sold in the markets of New York and Philadelphia, but that he himself found it very disagreeable, with a strong flavor of ants. He also noted that few people shot the bird, because it was thought useful and the meat was not savory.
What does the number 00445 in this page address mean?
It is this site's running number for the sections of Audubon's text in volume IV, counted in reading order, so it is not the plate number, 273, nor the first page, 282. The same count gives the Imperial Woodpecker, an entry without a plate at the start of the woodpecker family, the number 00425.