No joke – the yellow-bellied sapsucker does exist

Mention that you saw a yellow-bellied sapsucker to a non-birder and you’ll likely get stared at as if you were off your rocker.

The mixture of incredulity and downright amusement is a typical reaction from people who hear this name for the first time. Some seem to think it is a fictitious name invented just for laughs; others can’t believe such a thing exists, or why someone would choose such a moniker.

Yes, it is a real name for a real, honest-to-goodness bird.

Part of the name is a little tricky, though, simply because most people almost never see the bird’s belly. They usually view it as it is hitching its way up a tree trunk as other woodpeckers do.

It might have been more obvious to name it the red-throated sapsucker, or maybe the red-crowned. Both the male and female of the species share a bright red patch on their foreheads; the male’s throat is also a deep, vibrant red, whereas the female’s is white.

The second part of the name is more apparent because it reflects its foraging strategy: it methodically drills a hole into a tree to drink sap, which is an energy-rich source of food. The next time you walk through a patch of early-successional forest, look up and down the tree trunks. If you see neat rows of small holes in the bark, then you know a sapsucker was there.

These sapsuckers are very easy to identify by sound as well. In fact, they are probably the easiest to identify by their territorial drumming than our other woodpeckers. They start out with a rapid, machine-gun rattle, then slowly taper off into pairs and single taps – as if the bird just ran out of energy.

Their voice is unique when compared to our common woodpeckers (the downy, hairy, piliated, and northern flicker); a friend of mine describes it as sounding like a dog’s squeaky toy – quite unlike the staccato vocalizations given by the others.

This bird with the weird call and weirder name has an important ecological role, as I was to read in “The Birds of North America” summary of the volume of study done on it. Writers Eric L. Walters, Edward H. Miller, and Peter E. Lowther relate that the ruby-throated hummingbird is closely dependent upon sapsuckers: they build their nests near sap wells and take advantage of this food source, along with the insects it attracts; and they also follow sapsucker movements closely, possibly even coordinating their migration times to match those of the sapsuckers.

In addition, the authors point out that species that nest in cavities but do not excavate their own (such as some other birds and flying squirrels) benefit by using those drilled by sapsuckers.

All in all, the sapsucker is not as outlandish as it may first seem, but an integral, fascinating part of life’s intricate web.

Chris Corio, a volunteer at Fields Pond Nature Center in Holden, can be reached at fieldspond@juno.com