The Woodpeckers are a large family of similarly designed birds found in forested areas around the globe. This male, beautifully photographed by Parker Backstrom, was delivering food to his brood.
Woodpeckers come in a great variety of shapes and colors.
One group are the flickers which specialize in feeding on the ground, often focussing on ants. Yet even it has the stiffly pointed specialized tail feathers that held woodpeckers perch vertically on tree trunks. Another specialized group are the sapsuckers of North America. They drill small holes into the cambium layer of living trees, causing sap to ooze forth slowly. In all, their regular little square holes have been documented on over 250 species of native trees.