- Here in Minnesota there are nine woodpecker species that breed or winter in the state.

And among these nine Red-Headed Woodpeckers are the only species that's been in serious uh decline.

Over the last 50 years or so Redheaded Woodpeckers have experienced pretty drastic declines throughout their North American range largely due to habitat loss.

The conversion of Savanna habitat to agriculture and urban development are probably linked to why that's happened.

In Minnesota there's less than 0.01% of that habitat left and so Redhead Woodpecker have experienced an average annual decline of about 6% which represents a cumulative loss of 95% of the population.

Oak Savanna habitat is this really unique ecosystem.

It's not really a forest and it's not really a prairie it's kind of somewhere in the middle, low density of trees combined with sort of this open understory and then a lot of prairie grasses and forbes.

For Redhead Woodpeckers that's really important because of their unique foraging trait cause they sit on a low branch, fly out, grab an insect.

We think often of of woodpecker as being species that drill holes in trees and kind of go after insects in dead wood.

This species actually doesn't do that.

I've seen them here grab a live grasshopper and a a live cicada and fly with them through the air screaming the cicadas are screaming and then just kind of shove them under a piece of bark.

They will store pieces of acorn or insects under bar tree bark sometimes in the crevices of trees.

And there's only three other woodpeckers in North America that do that.

They're actually probably one of the more omnivorous woodpecker species as well.

They're known to eat, you know anything from berries to snails to small rodents.

Actually they will eat the eggs or nestlings of other bird species.

Historically they've been tied to farm agricultural areas and maybe a habitat like this where you've got some mix of dead and dying trees and open understory and then live trees as well to support acorn supply.

In about 2007, 2008, a very I would say intrepid group of volunteers from the Audubon chapter of Minneapolis learned that there was a relatively large population of Redheaded Woodpeckers breeding here at the Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve.

And they got excited cuz there were birders.

They decided that they needed to start monitoring the population annually we have about anywhere between 60 and 100 adults that breed here.

And besides Cedar Creek, the only other location around in the state where we have a larger cluster of birds is Camp Ripley which is a National Guard training facility.

I joined the project in 2017 as a postdoc and was fortunate to be able to raise some money to kind of formalize the project and, and really address some of the needs in terms of identifying the kind of factors that support Redheaded Woodpeckers here.

So asking the question, why are they doing better here than than other places around the state?

How big are their territories?

Are they interacting with other species?

Who are the predators?

Where are they selecting to place their nest?

We don't have a lot of information to date about what we call vital rates.

So fledgling success, nest success, a adult annual survival.

Understanding those things are sort of help us put the puzzle pieces together.

They create cavities in wood for their own nest.

For nest success what we do is really intensive nest monitoring.

This is an active nest tree that was marked last year where we had a pair of birds nesting and we, we have a long a telescoping pole that goes up about 40 feet into the air if needed.

These cavities are often about 20 feet off the ground kind of on average and we have a camera that goes inside and get pictures and videos of what's going on inside.

We can figure out when they're gonna fledge when eggs are gonna hatch and then how many fail on a subset of our nests.

We actually cut holes into the sides of the trees.

We create little porthole doors a couple days before the nestlings are gonna fledge.

We take the babies out, we measure them we put bands on them, we mark them with a radio transmitter and then we put them back and then the next day or the day after they fledge and we can go track them using VHF radio telemetry equipment.

Some parents get really mad and they'll they'll sort of fly around.

But you know, we've done this enough where we can do it in about 15 minutes.

Survival rates of nests are the same between trees that have porthole doors and and trees that don't.

So we know that we're not actually causing harm when we do this.

Each year there are, I think an average of about between 30 and 40 nests that we monitor and we've marked anywhere between like 15 juveniles and 20 juveniles in each year.

So we're, we're approaching about 50 fledglings that have been marked to look at fledgling survival.

And then another thing that we do is we mark adults.

We've marked 77 adults over the last several years with GPS devices to track their migratory movements.

One of the things that my research is sort of pointing toward is the importance of dead trees within the landscape.

So having not just one or two dead trees here or there you really need a variety of kind of classes of decay.

They do reuse trees from year to year but as you can see, you know, dead trees they don't last that long so that once they fall over they're not, they're not usable by Redheaded Woodpeckers or other species that are cavity nesters where you have you know, dead and dying trees.

Those are landscapes that we don't maybe appreciate as much as humans because they, they're not aesthetically beautiful.

They can cause damage to houses or farms and so we we tend to sort of be quick to cut down dead trees but the reality is that a lot of species depend on dead and dying trees for for food and for for their homes for habitat.

So Redheaded Woodpeckers are what we call facultative migrants, meaning that they in some years they migrate and, and other years they don't.

We don't really understand all of the reasons why but we think that probably the the biggest reason is because it is tied to mass and to food supplies during winter.

So if you're in a location where there's plentiful acorns that you can store or insects that you can store you'll be okay for the winter.

One of the things that actually surprised us here at Cedar Creek during my research was a number of females had were essentially mating with multiple males at the same time.

There was actually a female in this area that had a nest over there and then another, she nested with another male over there So within like about 200 meters she had two different nests and the males, that means that the males then end up doing more work that nest failed this ne nest was successful and then she did it again.

They have a pretty long breeding season usually starts end of April goes through sometimes late August, early September.

So there's time to have multiple nest which is really a great strategy if you're trying to get your genes into the population.

And then typically we see this sort of process of a brood reduction where there are maybe four eggs in a nest three eggs hatch and there are three fledglings and then only two make it to fledge.

I was lucky enough to receive more an another LCCMR grant or Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund grant to look at to kind of take what we've been doing here and then take it to the next level.

One of the things we don't really understand at the statewide scale is where there are populations of Redhead Woodpeckers and where they're breeding successfully.

The way that we're doing that is by using autonomous recording units or ARUs.

So these are tiny little devices that you can strap to a tree and they essentially record sound for hours and hours and hours.

We now have artificial intelligence machine learning algorithms that can help sort through all of the sound data that we collect and kind of pick out the sounds that we're looking for much faster than we can as humans.

We're putting these devices out all over the state.

We started last summer and we're gonna do another year of of data collection next summer to try to understand where these birds are and then hopefully understand more about what needs to be done at the statewide scale in terms of habitat restoration and conservation.

My hope for my research is that it can help inform land managers and the public about what this species need needs to survive and reproduce and kind of exist.

Having a primary cavity excavator in a landscape is important because it actually they create habitat for other species, bluebirds, wood ducks mice, flying squirrels that all depend on cavities for for nesting and roosting.

They are really a a flagship species of the oak savanna ecosystems.

It would be a tragic loss to lose oak savanna completely.

It's an incredibly unique, beautiful ecosystem that evolved over millennia and I think we owe it to ourselves, you know not just species but ourselves to try to keep it for future generations.