I put a woodpecker to bed every summer evening at Big Dan Hole Pond. As the daylight begins to fade and the pond quiets to mirror the lavender sky overhead, I can hear the “Pick! Pick!” of the hairy woodpecker as she wends her way through the trees along the shoreline to find her nighttime sleeping cavity.

She usually appears from the east, probing loose pieces of bark for insects on the birches, maples, oaks and beeches that grow within the nearest twenty feet of the shoreline. As she hitches from one tree to the next she gets closer to the gnarled, partially hollow core of a beech tree that stands about fifteen feet away from the shoreline and within view of my cabin.

The hollow beech is riddled with holes and pockmarks and has long since lost its top. Although it looks as if it’s about to fall over, a curious push from me one afternoon proved its worthiness to stand up to a few more winters. When I knock on it, I can hear the hollow ringing inside, slightly muffled by whatever contents wild creatures have stashed inside its cavities. It possesses about ten or eleven holes, most of them on the eastern and southeastern side of the twenty-foot high ghost of a beech tree.

Visitors have often asked me, “Going to clean up that mess?” as they nod to the old beech. “Nope,” I reply. “That’s where woodpeckers make their homes.” Sometimes people look at me strangely, but most often they ask more about the woodpeckers and where they live.

Most people understand that woodpeckers raise their young in tree cavities, but few understand that woodpeckers live in trees all year round and depend on us to keep their homes from destruction. The lakeside along my property on Dan Hole Pond is festooned with naturally made woodpecker houses, and the undeveloped shoreline provides habitat for bullfrogs, duck families and snakes, as well as for woodpeckers.

And woodpeckers recycle their homes. What starts out as a flicker cavity, for example, may be taken over another year by a pair of noisy Great Crested Flycatchers, magnificent yellow and green birds who raise their young to the sound of their policeman’s-whistle call and adorn the insides of their tree holes with snake skins.

Other large woodpeckers, such as the Pileated, will use a tree cavity for a few years, and if it is nearby a large standing pool of water like a stream or pond, it will be taken over by a wood duck to incubate its young. Once hatched, the ducklings make the long drop to the water and safety on board their mother .

Small rotting birch stubs will be excavated by downy woodpeckers and chickadees for raising their young. On winter nights whole family groups of chickadees will crowd down inside a cavity to sleep warmly inside. Once the rising sun hits the tree and warms it, the inhabitants will emerge, sleepy and dopey, to begin their daily rounds for a breakfast of insects.

Downy Woodpeckers don’t normally roost communally like chickadees. But one frosty winter morning I heard the muffled calls of Downy Woodpeckers and watched in fascination as three Downies sleepily emerged one by one from a birch cavity into the sub-zero dawn

I like watching this female hairy woodpecker go to bed at night. As she lands on the beech, she circles a few times, all the while exclaiming, “Pick! Pick!” And then nearly quicker than the eye can see, she will disappear into the tree cavity. Muffled “Picks!” follow for a minute or two, and then all is quiet. The woodpecker sleeps safely for another night.

By Cynthia A. Melendy, UNH Cooperative Extension Lakes Lay Monitor