Northern Flicker: the woodpecker that feeds on your lawn

The short answer

• Flickers feed on the ground and eat ants as their staple. Seed feeders barely register with them.
• Suet is the one feeder food they rate top tier, and they need a cage with a tail-prop or backboard to use it.
• Yellow-shafted birds (East and far North) show yellow under the wing and tail, a red nape crescent and a black moustache on males. Red-shafted birds (West) show salmon shafts, no nape crescent and a red moustache.
• Treating a lawn for ants removes the reason a flicker visits your yard at all.
• White rump in flight is the fastest confirmation at any distance.

There is a woodpecker standing on your lawn, and it is hammering into the side of an anthill. Nothing has gone wrong with it. A Northern Flicker earns most of its living at ground level, and a lawn with ants in it is worth more to this bird than every seed feeder you own.

The ant specialist#

Ants are the staple. A flicker hammers into soil and into the sides of anthills, then works a long barbed tongue into the galleries and licks out adults, larvae and pupae. The bill is slightly downcurved, unusual among woodpeckers and much better suited to probing earth than to chiselling into hard bark. Beetle larvae, termites, caterpillars and, in autumn, fruit and seeds fill in the rest.

This one fact explains almost every question people have about flickers at feeders. The bird is not built around a food you can buy by the pound, and its behavior in your yard is driven by what your ground is doing rather than what your feeder is holding.

Reading the bird#

A flicker is big: 11 to 12.5 in long and around 130 g, roughly twice the weight of a Red-bellied Woodpecker. Both forms share a brown back barred with black, a heavy black crescent across the chest, and dense black spotting on a buff belly. In flight, a bright white rump patch flashes above the tail. At 200 yards, in bad light, that white rump is the whole identification.

The two forms differ in the head and in the color under the wings and tail:

Across a broad band of the Great Plains the two interbreed, and intergrades are normal there: orange shafts, a partial nape crescent, a moustache that is black on one side and red on the other. Those birds are not a puzzle to solve, they are the expected result where the two forms meet. In the saguaro country of the Sonoran Desert, look also at the Gilded Flicker, which pairs yellow shafts with a cinnamon crown.

Not the woodpecker you already know#

Against the other feeder woodpeckers, a flicker is unmistakable once you have the search image. Downy and Hairy Woodpeckers are black and white with a white back stripe and cling to trunks. A Red-bellied is barred black and white above with a plain pale face. The flicker is brown, spotted, crescent-chested, and usually standing on the ground looking upright and slightly awkward, more like an oversized thrush than a woodpecker.

At the feeder, and near it#

Flickers arrive later in the morning than other woodpeckers, often once the ground has warmed, and they come in as single birds or a pair rather than a flock. The approach is different too: they land on the lawn or on a low limb, watch for ten or twenty seconds, and only then move to food. They flush easily. A door opening 40 ft away ends the visit, which is why most people report flickers as brief and unpredictable visitors.

At a suet cage a flicker cannot do what a chickadee does. It needs to brace on its stiff tail, so a small cage hanging free on a wire gets one clumsy attempt and no more. Give it a vertical surface and the same bird will feed for two or three minutes at a time. It caches very little, which is the opposite of the Red-bellied pattern: what a flicker takes, a flicker eats.

In dominance terms it outranks nearly everything else at a suet cage by size alone, but it rarely needs to fight, because it usually turns up when the crowd has moved on.

Building a setup a flicker will use#

1. Suet Top
2. Peanuts (shelled) Yes
3. Mealworms Yes

That list is short by design. Suet is the one thing worth building around, and the delivery method matters more than the recipe.

1. Mount a large suet cage against a vertical surface. A cage with a wooden backboard extending 6 to 8 in below it, or a drilled suet log, gives the tail somewhere to press. Fix it to a trunk or a post at 5 to 6 ft. The design options are in suet feeders, and what goes in them is in suet for birds.
2. Put a low tray on or near the ground, in the open. Not tucked under a shrub. Flickers want a clear sightline and an escape route to a tree 20 to 30 ft away. See ground feeding for the hygiene rules that go with this.
3. On that tray, use suet crumbles, peanut pieces and mealworms. All three are eaten readily. Shelled peanuts and mealworms are the two that get noticed fastest.
4. Add water. Flickers use shallow ground-level water and open bare soil for dust bathing far more than they use seed. A bird bath with a 1 in deep edge does more work here than another feeder.

Do not expect much from seed. Black oil sunflower and cracked corn are occasional foods, striped sunflower, safflower and millet are close to ignored, and nyjer and nectar are nothing at all to this bird.

Why no flicker has appeared#

• You are only offering seed in hanging feeders. Nothing in a tube is on this bird's list. This is the most common reason by a wide margin.
• The suet cage swings. A 130 g bird with a stiff tail cannot balance on a free-hanging cage. Fix it flat against something solid.
• The lawn has been treated. No ants, no reason to land.
• Ground food is placed under cover. Flickers avoid enclosed feeding spots that a cat can approach unseen. Open ground with an escape tree is the pattern they want.
• The season is wrong for your latitude. In the far North, flickers are summer birds and are simply gone by November. In the South, the opposite: winter is when numbers rise.
• Starlings own the suet. A large woodpecker will wait its turn, but only for so long. If your cage is empty by mid-morning every day, see starlings.

The flicker year#

Late winter into spring. Drumming and calling start in February in the South, March or April further north. The long ringing wik-wik-wik-wik carries several hundred yards, and the drumming goes onto whatever rings loudest, which is often a metal chimney cap.

Summer. Almost invisible at feeders. Adults are working ant colonies and feeding nestlings in cavities, often ones excavated in dead limbs. Suet use drops to near zero in heat, partly because the food itself does not survive it.

Autumn. The best flicker season in the East. Northern breeders drift south through September and October in loose numbers, and yards that never see a flicker get one for a week. This is the right time to have suet and a ground tray running, as covered in fall feeding.

Winter. Where they stay, flickers switch heavily onto fruit and become far more willing to use a feeder. Sumac, poison ivy berries, hackberry and dogwood carry them through, and a suet cage becomes a genuine supplement rather than a novelty.

Frequently asked questions#

Why is a woodpecker on my lawn?

It is almost certainly a Northern Flicker, and it is eating ants. Flickers forage on the ground more than any other North American woodpecker, hammering into soil and anthills and using a long barbed tongue to lick up ants and their larvae. The bill is slightly downcurved, which suits probing soil rather than chiselling bark. A flicker working a lawn is doing exactly what it should be doing, and it is a sign the lawn still has an intact insect population.

What is the difference between yellow-shafted and red-shafted flickers?

They are two forms of the same species. Yellow-shafted birds occupy the East, the North and Alaska: yellow shafts under the wing and tail, a gray crown with a red crescent on the nape, a tan face and a black moustache on males. Red-shafted birds occupy the West: salmon-red shafts, a brown crown, no nape crescent, a gray face and a red moustache on males. Where the two meet across the Great Plains they interbreed freely, producing birds with orange shafts and mixed head markings.

What do you feed a Northern Flicker?

Suet first. It is the only feeder food flickers rate as a top-tier favorite in our preference data, and a large cage with a tail-prop or a suet log gives a 130 g bird something to brace against. After suet, shelled peanut pieces and mealworms are both taken readily, best offered on a low tray or on the ground rather than in a hanging tube. Sunflower and cracked corn are taken occasionally at best, and nyjer never.

Do Northern Flickers migrate?

Partly. Birds breeding in Canada and the northern states move south in autumn, so the East sees a distinct pull of flickers through September and October and higher winter numbers in the South. Western red-shafted birds are more sedentary and often just move downslope out of the mountains for winter. In the middle of the range you can have flickers all year, with the individuals in your yard in January being different birds from the pair that nested nearby in June.

How do I stop a flicker drumming on my house?

Drumming on metal flashing, gutters or vent caps in spring is territorial signalling, not feeding or nesting, and it stops by late May. It is loud because the bird is deliberately choosing the most resonant surface it can find. Damping the surface works: foam or a rubber pad under the metal removes the ring and the bird moves on. Excavation into wood siding is a different problem and needs the cavity itself blocked and the area covered.

Sources and further reading

1. Northern Flicker Cornell Lab of Ornithology, All About Birds Subspecies groups, ant diet and ground foraging
2. Feeding Birds Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Project FeederWatch Suet and feeder types that suit large woodpeckers
3. Guide to North American Birds National Audubon Society Range and seasonal movement