What's Your Nature?

Become a Nature Up North explorer to share your encounters with wild things and wild places in New York's North Country. Post your wildlife sightings, landscape shots, photos from your outings, and even your organization's events!

Pileated Woodpecker Holes

Posted by Mike Hom,
North Country explorer from Brussels, Belgium
February 5, 2014

This photograph is of a tracking sign of a Pileated Woodpecker. The Pileated woodpecker is a very large North American woodpecker and the holes in this broken tree trunk shows that a woodpecker was drilling holes to find insects. This picture was taken at Stone Valley, at the end of January. The picture shows the Pileated Woodpeckers feeding habitats, which this picture depicts it was probably looking for beetle larvae or carpenter ants. Pileated Woodpeckers chip out large holes in trees in search for insects. It is also a possibility that this dead tree was a nesting home. As these woodpeckers excavate their nests in the cavities of dead trees. I found this picture interesting because I did not realize how big of holes woodpeckers could make. Walking around Stone Valley, I remember our guide pointing the chipped out holes in trees from the pileated woodpecker, which I thought was interesting.