Gilded Flicker
Colaptes chrysoides

eBird gives this description for the Gilded Flicker:  Large woodpecker, very similar to Northern Flicker. Overall pale sandy brown with gray face and brown crown. Spotted below with black oval on chest. Underwing and shafts of flight feathers bright yellow. Males have red mustache stripe; sexes otherwise alike. Combination of face pattern and yellow in wings helps distinguish from both “Red-shafted” and “Yellow-shafted” Northern Flickers. Shows a strong affinity for saguaro cactus but also found in nearby woodland. Gives a piercing “kleer” call similar to Northern Flicker.  All About Birds offers this additional descriptive information about the Gilded Flicker:  In the thorny, sun-baked Sonoran Desert, Gilded Flickers perch high above the ground on the sturdy limbs of giant saguaro or Mexican giant cardon cactus. These desert relatives of the slightly larger Northern Flicker have yellow underwings and a bright cinnamon crown. Their calls ring across the desert in the early morning. Though these woodpeckers are tightly tied to giant cactus for nesting, they forage mainly on the ground, using their long tongues to pull ants from underground colonies.

I saw my first Gilded Flicker While hiking in Petrified Forest National Park on the morning of Tuesday, October 18, 2022.  I was in an area at the base of a cliff, south of the Newspaper Rock restricted area when I saw female Gilded Flicker on a nearby boulder.  Here are a couple of the photos I took that day. 

GILDED FLICKER I WATCHED IN PETRIFIED FOREST NATIONAL PARK ON TUESDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2022.
IN THIS SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT VIEW, YOU CAN SEE THE BLACK PATCH ON THE BREAST OF THE FEMALE GILDED FLICKER.

“Cool Facts” About the Gilded Flicker From All About Birds:

  • Animals living in hot environments tend to be smaller than relatives found in colder environments—a general pattern known as “Bergmann’s Rule.” Gilded Flickers, which inhabit very hot deserts and are smaller than Northern Flickers, are an example of this rule.
  • Woodpeckers have long tongues that can extend several inches beyond the tip of the bill. This adaptation helps them catch small arthropods from deep recesses—in the case of flickers, often ants that are deep underground.
  • European Starlings are an aggressive species that steal nest cavities from many native cavity-nesting birds. But the larger and more aggressive Gilded Flicker appears to be able to fend them off; starlings have no effect on their nesting success.
  • In the 1960s, taxonomists grouped the Gilded Flicker with the “Red-shafted” and “Yellow-shafted” flickers as a single species, the Northern Flicker, in part because of extensive interbreeding. A couple of decades later, in light of only limited hybridization of the Gilded Flicker with the other forms, Gilded Flicker was re-recognized as its own species.
  • The oldest recorded Gilded Flicker was at least 6 years, 4 months old and lived in Arizona.