Nesting birds – Middle spotted woodpecker (Dendrocoptes medius)

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🔽 License this footage here:
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Can you tell the spotted woodpecker species apart? Did you even know that there are several of them in the Czech Republic? Well, yeah, it's true. Remembering that the spotted woodpecker is the smaller black-and-white bird is not enough. There are five of them in our country.

For the needs of ordinary mortals, I would leave out the Syrian and the white-backed woodpecker at the beginning, because they are quite rare. It is far more common to encounter the three remaining species, which follow nicely in order of size - the great, middle and lesser spotted woodpecker. The great one is "the" spotted woodpecker that everyone probably remembers, because it is the most common species in our country and we see it almost everywhere. It is very easy to distinguish the lesser one because it is only as big as a sparrow. Then, however, there is one more tricky intermediate stage which might confuse some observers - the middle spotted woodpecker. And it is the one that we are going to watch together today.

The middle spotted woodpeckers are warmth-loving birds that inhabit mainly the lower altitudes of our country. We often come across them in floodplain forests or sparse oak woods, where they make a strange meowing-moaning call in early spring (hopefully I will finally manage to record it one day). They are among the flagship species of my favourite type of forest to wander with my camera - light rocky slopes with old twisted oaks. It is in their decaying wood that these woodpeckers like to make their nest cavities. They don't have as robust a beak as their great cousins, so they like to search for delicious little creatures right on the tree trunks or under the top layer of the bark. The wood around their nests is therefore often pecked off and from a distance it will attract attention with its rusty colour, as you can see in today's video.

If I were to suggest a simplifying tool to distinguish the middle spotted woodpeckers from the other species, I would recommend focusing on their head. Both sexes have a distinctive red cap over the entire top of their head, and the face looks very bright because the cheeks don't have the distinctive black patches that the great spotted woodpeckers have.

Middle spotted woodpeckers are birds that need well-preserved stands of old trees to live in, and are rarely seen in ordinary farm forests. I am therefore happy that Lesy města Brna (Brno City Forests) keep several non-intervention areas in its territory where all kinds of rare animals thrive, and I can regularly film them there with a sparkle in my eye.

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▷ Species
Middle spotted woodpecker (Dendrocoptes medius)

▷ Location and date
Brno district, Czechia | May 2019

▷ Equipment
Panasonic GH5 + GH5S
Metabones T Smart
Sigma 150-600 C
Sigma 105
Sigma 18-35
Rode Videomic Pro

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Middle spotted woodpecker | Dendrocoptes medius | Strakapoud prostřední | Mittelspecht | Pic mar | pico mediano | Средний пёстрый дятел

#europeanwildlife #woodpecker #dendrocoposmedius