All winter we had regular black-and-white visitors at our bird feeders.

Downey and hairy woodpeckers ate a couple cows-worth of suet (once given away, but now on a par with per-pound pork prices at the meat market). We enjoyed their daily visits, along with the frequent feeders: chickadees, titmice, goldfinches and nuthatches.

Then we began to see a few additional woodpeckers dropping in to ‘do lunch’ at our place, as winter finally wore out its welcome. We had visits by red-bellied woodpeckers and one regular red-headed woodpecker drawn to nibble at our suet bags. They were often seen squabbling with a few bluejays over who had the right to squat on the pole holding the suet and seeds.

In addition, we had a few exciting drop-ins by ‘the big guy’: the pileated woodpecker, Michigan’s largest beak-pounder.

More recently, we spotted the first of the returning northern (yellow-shafted) flickers in the woods nearby. Once they mate, breed and hatch hungry chicks in their tree-trunk nest, the noise level goes up fast. There’s nothing that screams for food louder than flicker young.

Michigan hosts eight varieties of woodpeckers (five of which stick around to share winter), plus a few visitors that drop in off their usual fly-way or habitat routes to perk things up for bird-watching mavens.

North America is just one of of the species’ known homes. In all, there are 214 woodpecker species worldwide.

Our Michigan birds may be the more conservative dressers. In the Americas, the woodpeckers found from Mexico down to the tip of South America are more flashy and colorful when it comes to plumage.

Still, our own tree-pounders have some class of their own in their appearance, so getting to observe them winter-to-summer still spices up a birder’s viewing.

The woodpecker is unique among all birds in its form, structure, reproduction and behavior. It is also singular among birds in that it can both dig its own food (insects and grubs) from deep within a hard tree trunk and excavate its own nest holes, giving it an advantage over many other avian species.

While woodpeckers do sing in their own way, it is their percussive calling-card in spring that tells you one is in your woods. And when they ‘drum,’ as their fast bill-jabbing is called, the sound grabs your attention fast.

In the spring mating season, woodpecker drumming increases; it’s often heard the moment you rise to go out in the morning, often accompanied by a cooing chorus of mourning doves.

When it comes to drumming, no one does a better tree-trunk paradiddle than the pileated woodpecker. As Michigan’s largest, it is also the loudest wood-driller of all. When its beak pounds, the chips and chunks fly.

When one showed up this year to begin drumming on a storm-damaged oak along our driveway, it sounded from inside the house like a heavy-handed bill collector pounding on the front door.

Checking it out, I saw a large, mostly black woodpecker tearing part of the oak’s trunk away as it created a pair of large, deep excavations in the tree trunk, one of which was the typical oblong, coffin-shaped hole, a trademark of this bird. Like a feathered jackhammer, it jabbed away, digging out carpenter ants that infested the old tree’s interior.

This bird is about the body size of a crow, with a wide wing span, white racing stripes on its dark head and neck, and a flashy flared top knot of bright red feathers—the model for the cartoon character, Woody Woodpecker.

The smaller downy and hairy woodpeckers can get the volume level up too, actively drumming away to feed on insects stirring in the bark or chiseling out a new nest site.

Among other spring returnees are the yellow-bellied sapsuckers, a sure indicator that all vestiges of winter are over. They are, like the northern flicker, migrating woodpeckers that desert us for warmer climates over the winter months.

More commonly seen in northern Lower Michigan and the Upper Peninsula are black-backed woodpeckers. And, depending on the severity of winter, you may see red-bellied woodpeckers. In our recent, very cold winter, we saw few near the feeders, but during the milder winter of the previous year we saw this woodpecker show up quite often.

A few woodpeckers are not as common in Michigan, but have territories close enough so they may be irregular visitors.

Regulars or not, when woodpeckers drum steadily, it’s proof that spring is really here!