Welcome to the neighbourhood: How a noisy woodpecker delivered a message about climate change

I’ve not seen the woodpecker, but I’ve heard it. It drills into the wall in the early morning, as the light, the shade of the most gently smoked salmon, starts to wash over the valley. In the late afternoon, the sky now a deeper, blood-stained red, it bores away with the same intensity. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

If you run to try to catch it in the act, there’s no sign of it, just of the damage it has inflicted on the sage-painted weather board, of which it has taken chunks. The landlady is not happy. Of course, she loves nature, but this is valuable real estate. Something needs to be done. The woodpecker has to go.

Several days later, two men arrive with a ladder. The badges on their uniforms reveal they work for a pest control company. One was formerly employed with the forest service and knows a thing or two about birds. Ours, he says, is most likely a northern flicker, a bird known for the flashes of red feathers on the underside of its wings. At this point in the year, most have headed south. But warmer winters mean they are increasingly staying put and looking to find a place to live. It is sending us a message.

Birds have long been famed for being the literal canary in the coal mine, warning underground workers of the presence of dangerous gases. Over the past two decades, as climate patterns have shifted and temperatures in parts of the planet have risen, birds have again assumed the task of sentry and sentinel, signaling the devastation we are wreaking on nature. If a bird is happy where it is, it will stay put. If not, it has the ability to lift its wing and fly away.

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Change is not necessarily bad for all birds. Climate alterations can expand the range of some species. Over the past few decades, several species once limited to the US’s southern states, such as the orchard oriole and blue-winged warbler, have extended their range northwards, delighting naturalists and the birdwatchers in the northern United States.

But that same shifting climate also threatens hundreds of other species. A 2014 survey carried out by the National Audubon Society, the US’s pre-eminent conservation group fighting for birds, said 314 of the nation’s 588 specifies studied were found to be at risk from global warming.

Half of those 314 were classified as “climate endangered”, meaning they are projected to lose more than 50 per cent of their current range by 2050. The other 188 species are classified as “climate threatened” and expected to lose the same amount by 2080. Among those most threatened is the bald eagle, America’s national bird.

“It’s a punch in the gut. The greatest threat our birds face today is global warming,” Audubon’s chief scientist Gary Langham, who oversaw the report, said at the time. “That’s our unequivocal conclusion after seven years of painstakingly careful and thorough research. Global warming threatens the basic fabric of life on which birds – and the rest of us – depend.”

Some context. Late last year, we relocated from New York City to Seattle for work. The city’s rents are similarly extravagant, exacerbated by the tech industry’s high wages and an historic failure to build sufficient affordable homes. Homelessness appears to be getting worse.

We are fortunate enough to have rented a place with a view of both the mountains and an arboretum. Even in winter, the Emerald City is a cascade of colours.

We’ve not yet unpacked the boxes containing the curtains, so it is hard so sleep in. I wake early for work because of the time difference. The woodpecker appears keen to keep us alert.

Twenty-nine words applicable to our woodpecker, not in alphabetical order: persistent, relentless, percussive, ebullient, demonstrative, determined, nesting, metronomic, energetic, ambitious, rhythmic, forceful, repetitive, entranced, rapt, inebriated, exhilarated, delirious, deliberative, engrossed, focussed, targeted, industrious, intoxicated, unyielding, natural, impactful, resolute, smart.

And another one – one that was unexpected: welcoming. The woodpecker’s attentions made two new arrivals feel they were part of the neighbourhood.

A woodpecker pecks, or “drums”, up to 20 pecks per second, which equates to 1,200bpm in electronic dance music – faster even than most extratone, the fastest genre. Not all female woodpeckers drum, but female northern flickers do, so the gender of ours remains undetermined. Over the course of a day, scientists have measured it can peck 12,000 times, searching for food or a nesting site.

And it does so with the force of up to 1,200 Gs – a power that would more than easily create traumatic brain damage in a human. Scientists have studied woodpeckers to see how they might provide insight into how to better protect everyone from car passengers involved in accidents, to American National Football League (NFL) players vulnerable to chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE.

They concluded the woodpecker protects itself in four ways: a strong yet flexible bill, a hyoid (a structure of bone and elastic tissue that wraps around the skull), an area of spongy bone in the skull, and little space between the skull and brain for things to rattle around.

A 2015 study produced by members of the department of engineering mechanics at Beijing’s Tsinghua University and published by the Public Library of Science, concluded the hyoid was especially important. “The hyoid bone and muscle [provide] a strong constraint on the first cervical vertebra, thus reducing the relative motion of the neck,” it said.

Things may not be that simple. A February 2018 study published by George Farah of the department of anatomy and neurobiology at Boston University School of Medicine, studied the brains of preserved woodpeckers for the presence of a protein called tau. Tau has been linked to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, and is seen as a marker for chronic neurological symptoms that develop following traumatic brain injury.

The paper detected the presence of tau in the brains of the woodpeckers, but not in those of the control group of red-winged blackbirds, a species that does not peck. “Further studies are needed to determine what forms of tau are being deposited in the woodpecker brain and if these deposits are pathological,” the paper concluded.

The pest control man was only partly correct about our woodpecker, whose latin name is Colaptes auratus.

Chad Wilsey, an Audubon scientist based in the Pacific northwest, says the area around Seattle has always been part of the northern flicker’s year-round territory. Yet, he says climate change had impacted the birds in two ways; they are spending longer at the northern reaches of their range, in places such as Canada, and less time in the southern fringes. “Since the 1960s, there has been a decline in the wintering population in places such as Florida and Texas during the winter, because the temperatures are milder,” he says. “They are good to stay where they are.”

A study published in Science found rising temperatures have driven away robins and wrens from Mississippi during the winter. Nine other Mississippi birds have lost 90 to 100 per cent of their summer ranges.

Wilsey says birds are incredibly sensitive to other changes in the environment, such as the presence of food, in the form of seeds and insects. The society’s report, which found 314 US species were at risk from global warming, was deeply disturbing, he says. “We want to protect wildlife and biodiversity because it is something to cherish in our world. We want our children to inherit the same planet that we did.”

He says birds are also intrinsic to a broader eco-system, as are insects and trees. The challenge is not unique to the US. Mark Eaton, a scientist with Britain’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, says climate change is already having a massive impact on birds in Britain and Europe. “We know that climate change is going to impact all biodiversity, but the effects are particularly visible within birds because they are so mobile, and so can respond rapidly,” he says, speaking from Northumberland.

Because of warmer temperatures, birdwatchers in Britain are more frequently seeing species that rarely visited previously, among them the little egret and the bee-eater breeding more frequently. This has all happened in the space of 20 years, he says. The other side of the coin, is that some species of northern Britain are dwindling in numbers as their ranges move north and out of the country. Among these are birds such as the redwing, a species of thrush.

He says changes in the climate are impacting such celebrated species as the capercaillie, a large grouse that is iconic to the ancient pine forests of Scotland. Colder springs and warmer, wetter summers had devastated their breeding success, leading to rapidly falling numbers.

Indeed, a survey carried out in 2017, found numbers of the shy bird, reintroduced to Scotland in the 1830s after they disappeared, have fallen by 50 per cent in just two decades. The survey, overseen by the government agency Scottish Natural Heritage, suggests there may be as few as 1,114 left, concentrated in wooded parts of Strathspey in the Cairngorm mountains. “It’s dismaying, and it’s a a bit like watching a slow motion car crash,” he says, saying seeking to pull on the levers that are driving climate change is like trying to steer an oil tanker.

Eaton says the loss of birds have a major impact on eco-systems, as well as the economy, with fewer tourists. What price can be put to the music of bird song? “There is also the moral imperative,” he adds. “We’re impacting our planet in unimaginable ways. We need to come to our senses about what we are doing to the world.”

Both Eaton and Wilsey believe it is vital society does what it can to help mitigate the impact of climate change and help the birds, for example by establishing new parks and reserves, and protecting habitats. A study published last year by the University of Helsinki found the presence of conservation areas allowed northern bird species to maintain their presence in the southern boundary of their areas of distribution.

‘By slowing down the harm caused by climate change, conservation areas provide us with a grace period for tackling the causes and consequences of climate change,” said Aleksi Lehikoinen, a research fellow at Finnish Museum of Natural History. “The findings encourage us to increase the number of conservation areas.”

Eaton says this is perhaps the most time-effective way to help birds confronted by dramatic changes. “We should be asking how can we mitigate this when the conditions are against them,” he says. In terms of protecting habitats, “do we need to create new natural parks,” he asks.

In the meantime, the scientists say, the birds are already adapting. Birds such as great tits are becoming smaller in size because of the need to build less fat during warmer winters. This is happening all over the world.

In New Zealand, red-billed gulls have steadily lost pounds as temperatures have warmed. In Finland, tawny owls in the country’s southern parts are evolving to deal with warmer winters with less snow by steadily changing colour, from pale grey to dark brown, according to a study looking at data reaching back 28 years.

The men with the uniforms did not want to harm the woodpecker, just scare it off. They climbed the ladders, and attached shiny metal mirrors to the areas of the wall where it has been attacking. When the wind picks up, they rattle on their wires. Another noise to get used to.

For a while, we continued to hear the woodpecker. It was somehow pleasing that it was not so easily deterred from its labours.

But that was a few weeks ago. Since then, things have become quiet. No more tapping, no more drilling, no more Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

The woodpecker has gone. And, of course, we miss it.