Scientific name:
Picoides major

Natural spread:
needle, mix, and foliage-forests

the big colorful-woodpecker is the most frequent type of its type and probably "the woodpecker" quintessential. it lives in the needle in many subtypes, mix, and foliage-forests almost whole Europe, North-Africa and Asia of the Mediterranean until Japan and Siberia. Near the human being, it settles also in parks and gardens. Sincerely black-and-white drawn, the sexes differ in the red neck-stain of the male. The later black vertex-plate is still shining red in the youth-dress with both, they then are similar for the means-woodpecker (Picoides medius).

Reputations Colorful-woodpeckers attract attention through its Balztrommeln in the spring, with the male and females with its beaks up to 10-once in the second against a hollow tree or branch beats, so that it resounds far-to. Otherwise, they are not as reputation-joyful as the black-woodpecker, has heard a longer rasp, however, if startled it takes off.

Food In the spring and in the summer, the colorful-woodpeckers exterminate large quantities at insects and its larvae, among them also many forest-pests. To the autumn and in the winter, they change to vegetable food more and more. The woodpecker-smithies, at which the birds wedge jaws and fir-taps into a bark-column, about which seeds out-hammer down, are conspicuous. Furthermore, they look for nuts, acorns, also fruit and buds. Colorful-woodpeckers like to "curl" during the spring, d. h. they beat holes in the bark of young trees, of which the leaving sweet juice then is licked off.

Precincts Until on its northern subtypes, that can avoid the food-lack in strict winters in its native precincts far southwards, colorful-woodpeckers spend its whole life (up to 8 years) in a relatively small area as stand-birds. The precinct-sizes and locations are subject to bigger fluctuations according to food-offer and settlement-density.

Other types The blood-woodpecker (Picoides syriacus) very similar the colorful-woodpecker advances from Southern Europe farther northward recently. Both types mingle together in some areas. As further "colorful-woodpeckers" of the same type, the means-woodpecker (P) lives. medius, the small-woodpecker, P. minor, and the biggest type, the white-back-woodpecker (P). leucotos (Eastern Europe) in the European spread-area of the colorful-woodpecker. they are largely each other similarly in the plumage-colors and its way of life. Also north and Central America, several live in each other similar types of the type Picoides.

Endangering The three-toe-woodpecker (Picoides tridactylus) belonging to the same type is on the red list of the endangered types with us.