Woodpeckers are fascinating and beneficial additions to any backyard, offering natural insect control and lively entertainment with their distinctive climbing and drumming behaviors. Species like the Downy, Hairy, and Red-bellied woodpeckers are common residents across North America, often remaining in the same territory year-round. Attracting these birds requires a specific approach that caters to their unique foraging and nesting habits as cavity-dwelling birds. By strategically adjusting the available food, habitat structures, and safety measures in your yard, you can create an environment where these cling-footed visitors will feel welcome and secure.
Providing the Right Food Sources
The most effective way to encourage a regular woodpecker presence is by offering high-calorie, fat-rich foods, particularly during the colder months when insects are scarce. Suet is the most powerful attractant, as its dense beef fat composition mimics the energy they would naturally derive from wood-boring insects. Providing suet in a wire cage or a log feeder allows the birds to cling vertically while feeding, which aligns with their natural posture on a tree trunk.
It is helpful to select suet cakes that contain added ingredients like peanuts, nut meats, or dried fruit, which boost the caloric content. In warmer climates, choose “no-melt” suet doughs, which are less likely to become greasy and contaminate their feathers. Position these suet feeders securely against a tree trunk to make the woodpeckers feel more comfortable and protected while they feed.
Beyond suet, other supplementary foods include unsalted, shelled peanuts and black oil sunflower seeds. Woodpeckers lack the ability to easily crack hard seeds, so offering sunflower hearts or chips on a platform feeder simplifies the process for them. Peanuts can be provided in a dedicated mesh peanut feeder, which forces the bird to peck and extract the pieces, engaging their natural foraging instincts. Placing these supplemental feeders at varying heights and close to natural cover helps ensure a steady and diverse food supply throughout the year.
Creating Habitat Features
Woodpeckers are primary cavity excavators, meaning they create their own nest and roosting holes in dead or decaying wood, and providing this structural element is fundamental to their attraction. Retaining a dead tree, known as a snag, in a safe location is the single best habitat feature you can offer, as it provides both nesting sites and a continuous source of wood-boring insects for foraging. If a full snag is not feasible, leaving large dead branches on mature trees or placing a large log on the ground can offer a substitute food source.
For nesting, most woodpecker species will not use a standard, empty birdhouse, preferring to excavate a fresh cavity. To encourage use of a man-made structure, you must install a custom nesting box that is filled completely and tightly packed with wood shavings or coarse sawdust. This simulates the soft, punky wood of a snag, prompting the bird to “excavate” the material and complete the final nest cavity themselves.
Mount these specialized boxes securely to a tree or post, typically between 8 and 20 feet high, with the entrance hole facing away from prevailing winds. The presence of mature trees provides drumming surfaces for communication and courtship. A dense stand of mature trees offers the necessary cover and vertical space for the woodpeckers to feel secure while resting and moving around the area.
Minimizing Hazards and Ensuring Safety
A clean and reliable water source is just as important as food, and a shallow bird bath can meet their drinking and bathing needs. Woodpeckers, being shy birds, often prefer a water basin that is placed in a secluded or partially shaded area, away from high foot traffic. The water depth should not exceed one or two inches at its deepest point to ensure they can bathe safely.
Adding a dripper or a small bubbler to the bird bath will create movement, which helps attract their attention and keeps the water from becoming stagnant. During freezing temperatures, a thermostatically controlled heated bird bath provides non-frozen drinking water when natural sources are locked up. Regular cleaning is necessary to prevent the spread of disease, especially in a shared water source.
Minimizing or eliminating the use of broad-spectrum insecticides and pesticides on your lawn and trees is another safety measure. Since a significant portion of a woodpecker’s diet consists of insect larvae, grubs, and ants found beneath bark and in the soil, chemical treatments remove their natural food supply. Maintaining a chemical-free yard ensures that the ecosystem can support the diverse insect population they rely on.
Finally, addressing the risk of window strikes is important, as these collisions are a major cause of bird injury. The most effective solution involves breaking up the reflection on large windows by applying materials to the exterior glass. This can be achieved by hanging strips of Mylar tape, installing screens, or placing decals in a dense pattern, spaced no more than two inches apart. Alternatively, positioning feeders either very close (within three feet) or very far (over 30 feet) from the window prevents birds from building up the speed necessary to cause a fatal impact upon collision.