In response to Marlene Condon's querry about the frequency of Hairy
Woodpecker sightings, I can add the following data from the upper
valley of Cedar Creek in Shenandoah County: We have submitted 1094
complete checklists to eBird for Shenandoah County (all but a handful
from the area noted); of these, 763 included Downy Woodpecker while
only 211 included Hairy. These lists date back to the fall of 1979
and cover all seasons and years since. These data fit with my
subjective sense that Hairys are less common than Downies, though I am
a bit surprised that the ratio isn't even larger. Put another way, we
see Downies commonly but Hairys are quite infrequent. I believe there
are three explanations for this. First, Downies are commoner in the
valley bottom where the habitat is more mixed and there are houses and
farms; Hairys are more (or, at least as) common in the forests moving
up the slopes of the surrounding ridges where there is little habitat
diversity. Second, Downies are common feeder visitors whereas we have
no record of a Hairy coming to one of our feeders. Third, there is a
definite bias in our submitted checklists. Far more--perhaps 80% of
the total--cover the area around our house and adjacent fields and
woods which are in the valley bottom. Thus, combining the habitat
preference with the use of feeders would be expected to lead to more
Downy records for us. I did not try to analyze time trends. Hope
this helps.
Dave Davis
Arlington and Cedar Creek
