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Green Woodpecker — printable fact sheet
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Green Woodpecker
Picus viridis
Picus viridis is a woodpecker that has largely given up woodpecking. It spends most of its time on the ground, hopping awkwardly across short grassland, lawns and heaths, hunting ants - and it is a specialist to an extreme degree, with ants and their pupae making up the overwhel…
Did you know?
- The tongue of the Green Woodpecker can extend up to 10 cm beyond its beak, allowing it to reach deep into ant nests.
- The green woodpecker's tongue wraps right around the back of the skull, with the hyoid horns running up over the cranium and, in this family, anchoring near the nostril or eye - the anatomy that lets a small head store a very long tongue. It will excavate deep shafts into anthills and even into the sides of ant-infested lawns, leaving conical holes gardeners often blame on moles. Green woodpeckers are among the very few birds whose ranges have expanded across Britain in recent decades, tracking milder winters.
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