__________________________________________________ _____________________________________
COUNTRY NOTEBOOK: M.Krishnan:The Great Black Woodpecker: The Sunday Statesman: 21 August 2016
__________________________________________________ _____________________________________

THE GREAT BLACK WOODPECKER

"IMAGINE a Woodpecker almost the size of a crow and blacker, with the jet black of its plumage and bill set off by brilliant blood-red on the head, a little white on the spread wings and white on the body above and below the base of the tail, and imagine, further, that the bird is as arresting in its behaviour as in its looks -- and you have the Malabar Great Black Woodpecker.

It is a forest bird as most woodpeckers are, for without wood the birds cannot peck their living from bark and holes in the branches and boles. But while a good few of the tribe (the Golden-backed Woodpecker is a familiar example in the South India) frequent groves and orchards and even city gardens, the Great Black Woodpecker is a bird of the hill-jungles. In an old book that I have on South India's avifauna, it says that this bird "inhabits evergreen forests, ascending the hills to 3000 feet". I have seen it in markedly deciduous forests of the Western Ghats at that height and there it is most conspicuous in summer, when the trees are bare.

The white on the lower back and abdomen, and the white "band" in the wing are displayed only in flight; when the bird is on a tree trunk it looks all black in a top-view or side-view, and it is rarely one gets a frontal view of a woodpecker on a tree. However, the blazing vermilion of the top of its head (the male has more red on the head than the female) and its big black body is striking, even from a distance. But for its outsize black looks, it behaves very like others of its tribe, perching on the boles of trees at an angle of 45 degrees with the stiff tip of its wedge-shaped tail pressed against the bark to give it stance stability, and ascending the tree trunk jerkily (usually in a spiral) and flying from tree to tree with alternations of swift whirring wing beats and a swinging bound through the air with closed wings. It drums, like many other woodpeckers, on resonant dead woods, but its drumming has a depth and carrying power that lesser woodpeckers cannot achieve.

WHY do Woodpeckers drum? The German woodpecker specialist, Heinz Slelman, says that it is not to find food (the investigation of bark and tunnelled wood for prev is carried on much more silently) but to call or communicate with a mate, to get in touch with others of their own kind and to advertise the territory that the birds drum. He adds that they have regular drumming sites in suitable trees that he terms xylophones, though they will often drum on any branch or tree-trunk that happens to be handy and that the sound carries much further than their calls.

On a still morning, the deep, quick throb of the Great Black Woodpecker's drumming is clearly audible from half a mile away and is quite distinctive in its sound and duration. The drumming is done by a rapid, sustained, spasmodic, up-and-down movement of the head on the outstretched neck, not by quickly repeated individual blows of the beak on the wood -- the rapidly moving head and neck are seen blurred like a plucked violin string, and the resulting throb is long-drawn and vibrant and strangely exciting to human ears, and may be to those of woodpeckers, too.

On an average, the drum-throb lasts for about two seconds and there are twenty beats within that time, so that each percussion and interspace are about 1/20 of a second in duration.

The bird has a variety of calls, over which there seems to have some confusion. The calls I have heard are a low, long whinny uttered in flight, and much louder cackles, somewhat varied, indulged in from a tree and occasionally also in flight. The flight call is pleasant and audible only from near. It is not one long call but broken up by the whirr-and-swing rhythm of the flight. The cackles are loud, grating and vary in duration. I quote the book I mentioned earlier in evidence of differences in description of the calls of this bird. "Mr. FW Bourdillon says it has loud and pleasant cry which it utters at intervals when climbing up the stem of some large tree and when passing from one tree to another it emit a loud chuckle. Mr. AP Kinloch calls it note a curious plaintive metallic clang and says that they posses a laugh only uttered in flight."

However, the most vivid description I have heard of this woodpecker and its call came from my wife. One day in March, when I returned to the forest rest house from a long outing, my wife (who had stayed behind) told me of three extraordinary birds she had seen while I was away. She said they looked remarkably like the three witches in Macbeth, and, what was more, she had distinctly heard them shouting, in derisive mockery, "All hail, Macbeth! Hail to thee, Thane of Glamis!"

It had been a fiercely hot day, and for a moment I felt quite concerned for my poor wife, who had an attack of sunstroke as a child that had left her vulnerable to the heat. But questioning her gently, I realised that she had actually seen and heard some birds, and by skillful cross-examination I was able to identify them as Great Black Woodpeckers -- an identification that was confirmed when I showed her the bird later."

- M. Krishnan


This was published on 31 March 1963 in The Sunday Statesman

# The photograph of the bird perched on bole of a tree has not been reproduced here.