A big family

el

Yesterday my fellow blogger on the other side of the globe posted a little Youtube of a woodpecker. I don't know if I believed that there would only be one specie of woodpeckers in the world - namely the one that rummages around the tree tops in the nearby woods (LOL!) - but I was surprised to see a tropical "version" of a woodpecker, (the west indian woodpecker), so I had to do a little search and discovered that there are about 200 woodpecker species in the world!  

Top of the page it's our (in northern Europe) well-known great spotted woodpecker, second the west indian woodpecker and third the ladderback woodpecker. Amazingly the use of cacti for breeding and roosting holes allows some woodpecker, like the ladderback woodpecker to live in otherwise treeless deserts. Looking at the picture, that is seriously what you can call a hostile environment. This can truly be called the magic of adaptation!

I always smile when I hear a woodpecker nearby. With it's 20 pecks a second (yes, that makes it 1200 pecks a minutte!) I've always thought it would be an obvious "mascot" to advertise headache pills :-)


Images ©fotoplatforma.pl and wikipedia.org


Comments

sunshine said…
I love woodpeckers in general, in Costa Rica we have about 10 different species. In fact, the first picture that shows on that article you mentioned is a Hoffman's woodpecker. Check out the following link: http://www.costaricabirdingtours.com/toucans.html
scroll down the page and after the toucans you'll find the species found in CR, some are very colorful and different.
Thanks very much Sunshine - they're amazing! Your little post caused a whole expansion on my view of woodpeckers! I would truly thrive in the tropics as I LOVE colors and the sun and your bird life alone seem like an incredibble cascade of colors.

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