Birds · plate 37 of 60
Woodpecker
Dryocopus martius
Headbutts trees for a living. Has thought it through.
Only 1.5% of people are Woodpeckers. (estimated)
If you're a Woodpecker
You work hard, loud and alone, and other people end up living in what you built. A black woodpecker chisels a nest hole into a living trunk, and when it moves on owls, martens and bats move in; you are an industrious, territorial, slightly deafening presence who stays on home ground and improves it.
A woodpecker's head works like a stiff hammer rather than a cushioned one; its brain is small and light enough that the blows simply do not hurt it.
The Woodpecker as a spirit animal
Matching a Woodpecker says you are persistent to a degree that unsettles people, and that you get results they then move into. You are energetic, territorial and not especially interested in company while working. The flaw is volume: you announce every project to the whole forest. A black woodpecker's drumming carries far beyond its own territory. Nobody has asked for the update. They get it anyway.
Grounded in how the species actually lives; nothing borrowed from anyone's tradition. Why we put it that way.
How to get along with a Woodpecker
Do
- Give them a project with a hard surface.
- Expect the noise and schedule around it.
- Visit the finished work; they rarely get thanked by the things that move in.
Don't
- Don't interrupt mid-hole. The rhythm is the point.
- Don't move into their tree without asking first. Everyone else does.
When it goes wrong: A Woodpecker under pressure hammers harder, faster and at the wrong thing; redirect them to a problem that can take it and let them wear themselves down.
The Woodpecker in a relationship
You love steadily, in a shared home you built with your own head. Black woodpecker pairs excavate the cavity together, split the incubating between them and often return to the same territory year after year; you are a practical partner, better with deeds than words. The deeds are loud but sincere.
Field notes
Every animal is placed on six personality traits derived from how the species lives. Your answers are placed on the same six, and the closest animal wins. How the scoring works
- Sociability
- 2
- Boldness
- 6
- Energy
- 8
- Curiosity
- 5
- Devotion
- 7
- Roaming
- 1
- A woodpecker's tongue is so long that, retracted, it wraps around the back of the skull.
- Woodpecker toes point two forward and two back, and the stiff tail feathers act as a third leg against the trunk.
- The black woodpecker eats mostly carpenter ants, chiseling into rotten wood and deep into ant nests to reach them.
Woodpeckers in literature
- Picus — Metamorphoses, Ovid (8)
- The Woodpecker — Panchatantra (The Sparrow and the Elephant), traditional (attributed to Vishnu Sharma) (200 BCE)
- Downy the Woodpecker — The Burgess Bird Book for Children, Thornton Burgess (1919)
Characters from public-domain works. Company, not a verdict.
Closest personalities
The animals whose profiles sit nearest to the Woodpecker's. If you got Woodpecker, one of these was probably your runner-up.
Other birds
EagleOwlRavenHummingbirdPeacockPenguinFlamingoAlbatrossParrotSwanFalconOstrichPigeon
Among the 60
Robert Kretschmer (1818–1872), Brehms Tierleben, Alfred Brehm (1879). Public domain, viacommons.wikimedia.org.All credits
