Northern Flicker

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Northern Flicker by Matthew Plante / Macaulay Library

Woodpeckers

Northern FlickerColaptes auratus

ORDER: Piciformes
FAMILY: Picidae

Basic Description

Northern Flickers are large, brown woodpeckers with a gentle expression and handsome black-scalloped plumage. On walks, don’t be surprised if you scare one up from the ground. It’s not where you’d expect to find a woodpecker, but flickers eat mainly ants and beetles, digging for them with their unusual, slightly curved bill. When they fly you’ll see a flash of color in the wings – yellow if you’re in the East, red if you’re in the West – and a bright white flash on the rump.

More ID Info

Year-roundBreedingMigrationNonbreeding

Range map provided by Birds of the World

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Find This Bird

To find Northern Flickers, try walking through open woods or forest edges, but scan the ground. You may flush a flicker from a feeding spot up into a nearby tree. Look for the obvious white rump patch in flight. Also, be sure to listen for their loud, ringing call and their piercing yelp. In summer, listen for the incessant yammering of hungry nestlings to find a nest.

Other Names

Carpintero Escapulario (Spanish)
Pic flamboyant (French)

Backyard Tips

Consider putting up a nest box to attract a breeding pair. Make sure you put it up well before breeding season. Attach a guard to keep predators from raiding eggs and young. Find out more about nest boxes on our All About Birdhouses site. There you'll find plans for building a nest box of the appropriate size for flickers.

Northern Flickers don’t habitually visit bird feeders, but you can find them in backyards and at bird baths. If your backyard has a mixture of trees and open ground, or if it’s near woods, you may find Northern Flickers simply by walking around the wooded edges. Find out more about what this bird likes to eat and what feeder is best by using the Project FeederWatch Common Feeder Birds bird list.

Cool Facts
- Although it can climb up the trunks of trees and hammer on wood like other woodpeckers, the Northern Flicker prefers to find food on the ground. Ants are its main food, and the flicker digs in the dirt to find them. It uses its long barbed tongue to lap up the ants.
- The "Red-shafted" and "Yellow-shafted" Northern Flicker groups formerly were considered different species. The two groups hybridize extensively in a wide zone from Alaska to the panhandle of Texas. A hybrid often has some traits from each of the two forms and some traits that are intermediate between them. The "Red-shafted" Northern Flicker also hybridizes with the Gilded Flicker, but less frequently.
- In 2024, ornithologists recognized the Guatemalan Flicker, long treated as a subspecies of Northern Flicker, as a distinct species based on vocal and genetic differences.
- The Northern Flicker is one of the few North American woodpeckers that is strongly migratory. Flickers in the northern parts of their range move south for the winter, although a few individuals often stay rather far north.
- Northern Flickers generally nest in holes in trees like other woodpeckers. Occasionally, they’ve been found nesting in old, earthen burrows vacated by Belted Kingfishers or Bank Swallows.
- Like most woodpeckers, Northern Flickers drum on objects as a form of communication and territory defense. In such cases, the object is to make as loud a noise as possible, and that’s why woodpeckers sometimes drum on metal objects. One Northern Flicker in Wyoming could be heard drumming on an abandoned tractor from a half-mile away.
- The oldest known "Yellow-shafted" Northern Flicker was a male and was at least 9 years, 2 months old when he was found in Florida. The oldest "Red-shafted" Northern Flicker lived to be at least 8 years, 9 months old.