The Eurasian Three-toed Woodpecker has three toes and taps dead trees to find insect larvae.
Its plumage is black and white, and the male has a yellow crown.
Three-toed Woodpeckers usually feed on conifer phloem sap mostly in spring. After a prescribed burn in southern Finland, Timo Pakkala and colleagues recorded a local pair beginning to feed quickly on the sap of fire-damaged Scots pines. Before the burn, the pair had used sap at other places within its territory.
For the following three weeks, the pair intensively used sap from the pines exposed to fire. The authors suggested that nutrients produced by the trees' damage response may have attracted the birds. The report records one pair using a newly available food source in a changed patch of forest.
An extinction-risk assessment has not been added yet.
A pair in southern Finland shifted its sap feeding to fire-exposed Scots pines after a prescribed burn and continued intensively for three weeks.