With its amazingly long tongue, it pushes bits of food into holes and later goes back and eats them. The male flicker has a black mark behind its bill. Both the male and female have a red patch on the back of their head. They live in open country, where ants make up half their diet. They go south in the winter to find ants.
Flickers eat more ants than any other birds do.
In your yard you might see a sapsucker digging wells in a spruce or box elder tree. It eats the inner bark, then laps up the sap with its tongue. It also eats insects, usually the ones that get stuck in the sap. Hummingbirds, warblers, and many other birds sip sap from sapsucker wells. Because tree sap stops running during the winter, the sapsucker can t eat, so it flies south to warmer places, such as the southern United States, Mexico, and Central America.