The forest’s engineer in the Pacific Northwest
The Pileated Woodpecker plays a vital role in the health and biodiversity of the Pacific Northwest’s mature forests. As the largest woodpecker in the region, it is an ecological powerhouse that helps shape the forest around it.
Pileated Woodpeckers are expert excavators, carving out large rectangular holes in old decaying trees to find food and create cavities for nests and roosts. This in turn can create habitat for secondary cavity nesters/roosters like Pacific marten, Flammulated Owls, silver-haired bats, of Vaux’s Swifts. For many species, availability of cavities for nesting and roosting is a limiting factor.
Additional impacts of Pileated Woodpecker activity include the creation of foraging opportunities for other species, acceleration of decomposition and nutrient cycling, increased heart rot fungi growth and inoculation, and mediation of damaging insect outbreaks.
The Pileated Woodpecker was included in the first two iterations of Oregon’s State Wildlife Action Plan as a management indicator species of mature and old growth habitats. Pileated Woodpeckers were once considered an indicator of old growth forests in the Pacific Northwest, but studies of habitat use and preference suggest that they are more accurately indicators of the structural elements that are characteristic of mature or old growth forests, or forestry practices that ensure older trees are retained. While populations of Pileated Woodpecker in Oregon are currently secure, conservation and management of this species can provide broad positive impacts to species that rely on mature forests with these characteristics.