Woodpecker Nest Data

We’re asking your help in a multi-year project studying woodpecker nesting in the Sisters Ranger District. The Eastern Cascades Audubon Society is a major supporter of this project through the Laughrige Grant program, and other supporters include Oregon Birding Association, OSU-Cascades, and the US Forest Service. You can help us by letting us know the location of woodpecker nests you spot while you are birding in the Sisters Ranger District. This includes nests currently used by woodpeckers. The location of nests you tell us about will remain private and will be used only for our research project.

Send Nest Data

The most important information you can provide is the location of nests.  We will revisit the locations you report several times in the next few months to make detailed observations of breeding behavior. Thus, when you spot a nest, or possible nest, TAKE A PICTURE WITH YOUR PHONE!  Email us the picture, along with information about how to contact you and how to find the tree, including nearest road or trail. If you have location activated on your phone, your photo will have GPS coordinates attached to the photo and this will help us find the nest!  

Our Project

Most woodpeckers create new cavities for nesting every year (notable exceptions are the northern flicker and Lewis’s woodpecker which re-use cavities). Newly excavated and vacated tree cavities are an essential resource for a suite of birds and small mammals who nest in tree cavities, but which cannot create a cavity. These species are referred to as secondary cavity nesters (SCNs; ~30 species of birds and mammals in the Eastern Cascades of Oregon). 

We are collecting data on cavity creation by woodpeckers, and the use of these cavities by secondary cavity nesters (SCNs) in subsequent years. This multi-year study of cavity nesting data will allow us to understand the interrelationships between woodpeckers and SCNs, the results of which will be used to build a “nest-web”. A “nest-web” is somewhat analogous to a food-web, but instead of predation linking species, it is the use of a common resource – the tree cavity, which links species (Martin et al. 2004; Figure 1). Typically, woodpeckers select trees with compromised heath and which show some decay in which to build their cavities and nests. Nest-webs have been described in several ecosystems, such as, the mix-wood forest of interior British Columbia (Cockle and Martin 2015), the pine forest of Florida (Blanc and Walters 2008), the Atlantic forests of Argentina (Cockle et al. 2019), and riparian forests in southwest India (Manikandan and Balasubramanian 2018), to name a few.

A long-term goal of our study is to quantify the nest-web for the forests of the Eastern Cascades region, which is expected to take several years of nest data. One of the objectives of quantifying a nest web is to identify preferred nesting trees and the keystone woodpecker species - that is - the species which builds cavities that are the most used by secondary cavity nesters.

Our preliminary results based on 3 years of data shows that woodpeckers and nuthatches support a diverse community of secondary cavity nesters.