Bird Identification

Northern Flicker

Colaptes auratus Length: 13"

What to Look and Listen for

Conspicuous and ubiquitous, the northern flicker is hard to miss. Any large, brown woodpecker hopping around on the open ground is a dead giveaway. In flight, the flicker shows brightly colored underwings and a bold white rump, and its flight style is more direct than that of the typical undulating woodpecker. A perched bird displays a brownish "zebrabacked" pattern above, with a sharp black breast shield and a grayish belly covered with black spots.

A closer look will reveal the flicker's regionally variable face and head pattern. Both male and female yellow-shafted flickers show a bright red V-shaped nape patch; the male also has two bold black mustache stripes. Male redshafted flickers have red mustache stripes, but neither the male nor female shows any color on the nape. Any flicker with some combination of these markings is likely an intergrade between the two forms. Other subtle plumage characters, such as the color of the throat and variability in wing color, may also reveal mixed parentage.

Flickers are just as easily heard as seen, with two primary calls heard most frequently: the single call note, sounding like a descending kee'er or kee'ew; and the territorial or courtship "jungle call," a rapid series of kee, kee, kee, kee notes, all of them generally at the same often difficult to distinguish from that of other woodpecker species.

Where and When to Look

Northern flickers occur from the tree line in North America south into Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. Yellowshafted populations breed from western Alaska across northern Canada, then east of the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Red-shafted flickers breed from the Rockies westward, and from southeast Alaska to Nicaragua.

Nonmigratory populations reside across most of the continent, pitch and cadence. The flicker's drumroll, delivered at a rapid, steady cadence, is but their numbers expand in winter with the influx of northern birds from Alaska and Canada. The western states tend to host more individuals of mixed parentage than do states east of the Rockies, but intergrades can occur anywhere in winter, especially in the southern and Western United States.

—Stephen Shunk

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