Even if you wouldn’t know what it was if it landed on your shoulder, you’ve probably heard the northern flicker’s distinctive drumming in spring.
It sounds something like a hammer drill and drives house cats berserk. Flickers are fiercely territorial. Loudly and repetitively hammering their bills against a resonant surface is this woodpecker’s version of Match.com — a nuptial announcement to other flickers that this house and garden are claimed and will not be shared.
Metal gutters are the sounding board of choice for our resident flickers, but siding will do in a pinch. My neighbors were horrified when of their siding.
So you might well wonder at my sanity in putting up a flicker house.
But despite their house-wrecking propensities, these are beautiful birds, buff and gray with black stripes and spots and a black bib on their chests. Unlike the downy woodpecker and sapsuckers, which also visit my garden, flickers do not hang out in trees. Instead, they scratch and delve through mulch and soft soil, likely ridding my garden of all sorts of insect pests. Fifty percent of the flicker’s diet is composed of ants. They also eat flies, snails, beetles, termites and caterpillars. In winter they switch to fruit, berries, seeds and nuts and happily dine at suet feeders.
My little chunk of suburban real estate doubles as garden and wildlife habitat. I’m always looking for ways to increase the diversity of bird species that hang out and raise their young here.
But because we have nesting house wrens, only large, non-nervous birds are an option. Robins and mourning doves are bold enough to ignore the wren’s insistence that they move elsewhere. Both build their nests in trees and don’t require housing assistance. Flickers, on the other hand, are cavity nesters, relying on holes in decaying trees, just the sort that municipalities decree are public safety hazards and cut down.
So wooden bird boxes stand in for holes in trees. If you’re handy, you can (there are plans at 1.usa.gov/1FwjVNA). Ready-made houses labeled for flickers also are available from garden centers and wild bird centers.
The box should be hung 10 to 20 feet above ground. I placed mine on the east side of the house, just below where the flickers drum every spring, hoping that they’ve been trying to tell me this is where they want to build a nest. Apparently flickers like to excavate their own holes, so to trick them into thinking they’re doing just that, I stuffed the box full of cedar pet bedding and nailed a thin piece of wood with a small hole in the center across the entrance. (Doing this also discourages starlings from taking up residence.)
Flicker populations have been declining due to habitat loss and competition from European starlings. To further discourage starlings, I plan to clean out the box and nail a piece of wood over the entrance hole in July, after the babies leave the nest.
If you worry that flickers will damage your house, scare them away by hanging strips of holographic Mylar tape near drumming sites. Just not next to their birdhouse.
Marcia Tatroe is the author of Her garden in Centennial is a Humane Society Urban Wildlife habitat, Audubon Habitat hero wildscape and a Xerces pollinator wildlife habitat where wildlife is encouraged and tolerated, come what may.
