Plate 132 – Three-toed Woodpecker

In the summer of 1832, John James Audubon and his wife Lucy and their two sons, Victor and John Woodhouse, went on the only family vacation that they ever took together. But as the publication of Birds of America was growing into a family enterprise, much of the vacation centered around work, and much of that work was watching, identifying, and drawing woodpeckers in Maine. Of those woodpeckers was the Three-toed Woodpecker. The bird that Audubon recognized as the Three-toed Woodpecker is now known as the Black-backed woodpecker. Audubon had seen “a few” in the Great Pine Swamp (see Plate 88) of Pennsylvania when he explored the area in the spring of 1829, some in Massachusetts, “and in all portions of Maine that are covered by forests of tall trees.” The birds today tend to stay far to the north where they chisel off the bark of spruce trees and any dead tree looking for insect larvae. Their range must have stretched once further to the south based on where Audubon reported sighting the bird. The last record of a Black-backed woodpecker in Pennsylvania on Cornell’s e-Bird system was on May 18, 2001 (see eBird Checklist S9962734). One was reported in Massachusetts on April 19, 2015 (see eBird Checklist S22941663. And eight is the most that anyone has reported seeing in Maine (see eBird Checklist S363375428).