With a mysterious ability to eat Poison Oak berries by the stomachfull without getting sick, a voice like a piccolo, and distinctive plumage, Northern Flickers are so charismatic they’ve acquired over 100 common names. They spend more time on the ground than other woodpeckers, eating ants. Keystone excavators with inch-long bills, they’re the original engineers of most Bufflehead Duck nestholes.
In flight, the white rump and flashing salmon-flesh-pink or golden underwings and tail make positive identification easy. When perched, look for the long-billed, vertical woodpecker shape; black-barred brown back; black crescent on breast; and blood-red mustache (technically malar stripe) at the male’s beak.
You’d be forgiven for thinking Northern Flicker, scientific name Colaptes auratus, was two different species, with golden-winged, black-mustached flickers to our north and east, and pink-winged, red-mustached birds here in the far west.
Well, until 1982, it was two species.
I used to think species were neat, well-defined, and separate. A sparrow was a sparrow, a towhee was a towhee; the lines between were clean. But such isn’t always the case.
Species mix. They interbreed. Black-capped Chickadees turn up with thin white Mountain Chickadee eyebrows. About 25 shades of song sparrow blend together across this continent. Scarlet and gold flickers intergrade in swathes in the rain shadow of the Rockies.
Found a flicker? Check the back of its head. You’ll need binoculars, or a bird blind, or a bird-feeder to get close.
If it has even two red feathers on its brown nape, it’s an intergrade — a genetic mix, a gray area. The Yellow-shafted subspecies alone has a red triangle on the back of its neck; Red-shafted locals lack this mark.
Also check the mustache. A Red-shafted flicker with a blackish mustache also has Yellow-shafted ancestors. Most locals are pure Red-shafted.
In 1982, the American Ornithologists’ Union lumped Yellow-shafted and Red-shafted Flickers into one species, Northern Flicker. Their genetics are almost identical.
Other, identical-looking pairs remained separate. Check out Alder and Willow Flycatcher, split in 1972, in Sibley’s Guide to Birds or Cornell Lab’s “All About Birds” website. They have no obvious differences, except home range and songs.
By the way, “lumping” and “splitting” are birder’s terms for separating and recombining species. Which reflects growing understanding of the complex relationships between species, how they intergrade, what genetics they carry. Boundaries can be fluid and confusing.
So each flicker’s a little different: Here a scarlet-winged, brown-faced female; there a salmon-winged youngster; here one almost golden, visiting, perhaps, from somewhere far away.
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