Great spotted woodpecker

Where does the great spotted woodpecker live?

Home: Woods, parks and gardens from Ireland all the way to Japan.

In the wild it lives in these countries: the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Poland, Sweden, Russia, China, Japan.

Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.

The short profile

Fully grown: 20–24 cm long. It weighs about 0 085 kilograms. On the menu: both plants and meat.

The story behind it

In early spring the woodpecker picks a hollow branch or a dead trunk that rings well and beats out a roll of about ten to sixteen strikes in well under a second. Both males and females drum, and a good, loud branch is worth as much to them as a good singing voice is to a blackbird. The bird does not get a headache because its beak is built to take the shock: the upper bill is a little longer and softer than the lower one, and a muscle braces the join with the skull like a spring. For food it works quietly instead, chipping into bark and pushing out a sticky tongue that reaches four centimetres past the bill tip to hook grubs out of their tunnels. In winter it wedges a pine cone into a crack in the bark, a workshop called an anvil, and hammers the seeds out one by one; the ground below can be carpeted with empty cones. Every spring it chisels a fresh nest hole into soft or rotten wood, and the old ones become homes for tits, starlings, bats and dormice.

Find it on the globe

Great spotted woodpecker is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.

It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.