Listen carefully to the chirping outdoors. You just might be able to pick out some baby birds.

Plenty of baby birds around our place are demanding to be fed these days. In January this column described how a woodpecker was drilling a cavity inside a dead cedar elm branch near my office. The black and white stripes across its back identified the bird as a ladder-backed woodpecker, a small species that's considered a desert bird.

The woodpecker worked rapidly, and one morning wood chips covered the hood of my pickup and the nearby ground. For reasons known only to the woodpecker, that hard working bird ignored a nice cavity higher up that had been prepared by woodpeckers a few years ago.

After the woodpecker completed its work, it left. Or at least I thought it did. Several weeks ago rattling and rustling sounds could be heard emerging from the new woodpecker cavity. This could mean only that babies were present. It also might have meant that a pair of woodpeckers, not just one, drilled out that cavity.

Soon both a male and a female ladder-back began arriving at the nest cavity, always one at a time. It was easy to tell them apart, since males have a bright red cap and females have a black one. Both sexes have distinctive black and white markings on the sides of their heads.

Each time the bird would disappear inside the nest cavity, emerge after half a minute or so and then fly away. Ladder-backed woodpeckers are small birds, but when one entered that cavity I wondered how it could fit inside with its babies and still have room to turn around to exit.

Between visits by their parents, the baby bird or birds kept up their noisy rustling sound. After a few weeks or so, a chorus of chirps began emerging from the nest cavity. Eventually, a young woodpecker began poking its head outside the hole while waiting for dinner. At this stage it chirped only occasionally and never while it was looking for mom or dad.

The young woodpecker has a red cap, so I assumed it was a male. But the Cornell Lab of Ornithology web site ( explained that young female ladder-backs also have a red cap.

The next question was how many young were in the cavity. According to the Cornell Lab, ladder-backs lay from four to seven eggs. But so far I've seen only one head emerging from the opening, even though there seems to be room for more. Whether or not there are more should become obvious when it's time for flight lessons.
