European Green Woodpecker

Habitat: The Green Woodpecker is a bird of old orchards, parks and light forests. However, it appears as a vagrant in extensive forest areas and coniferous forests. It often forages far from trees on open grasslands.

Appearance: The Great Green Woodpecker is a resident bird in large parts of Europe. It is a fairly numerous breeding bird in Belgium and the Netherlands, a year-round resident and a winter visitor in fairly large numbers.

Breeding season: April to August, cavity nester in self-made hollows, sometimes also in nest boxes – both partners chisel out their nesting cavity in rotten wood over a period of weeks, the height of the cavity varies, the area around the entrance hole is also worked on, the freshness of the traces indicates whether the cavity is occupied, 5 to 8 eggs.

Characteristics: Length 30 – 36 cm, wingspan 45 – 51 cm, weight 150 – 205 grams, age 15 years.

Food: The green woodpecker searches for food on the ground more than our other woodpecker species. Its main food consists of ants and their larvae, which it extracts from their nests with its beak. Sometimes it digs arm-deep holes in the mounds of red wood ants. It licks up the ants that come to defend them with its long, sticky tongue. In southern Europe, it even plunders beehives, which it chops open. When climbing tree trunks, it supports itself on its tail feathers, just like other woodpeckers. During moulting, these feathers fall out only after the new ones have already formed.