Northern Flicker song and call

A Northern Flicker sounds like a long, loud, even laugh, wick-wick-wick-wick-wick or ki-ki-ki-ki, that can run on for many seconds from a treetop or a pole in spring. Its single call is a loud kleeer or klee-yer, a sharp whistle that drops in pitch. Up close, two flickers facing off or courting trade a squeaky wicka-wicka-wicka or flicka-flicka, the sound that gave the bird its name. Flickers also drum, often on metal, and you will hear all of this from open woods, parks and lawns across the whole country.

What the song sounds like: the long laugh

The flicker's spring announcement is a series of identical notes, wick wick wick wick wick, delivered fast and steadily for several seconds at a time. It is loud enough to carry across a park and has a laughing quality, which is why it is often confused with the Pileated Woodpecker. The flicker's version is thinner and flatter: it lacks the Pileated's ringing resonance and volume, and it holds one pitch rather than rising and falling.

The other named sound is the one people write as wicka-wicka-wicka, flicka-flicka or woika-woika. It is softer and squeakier, given by two birds close together, and it comes with a show: the birds swing their heads back and forth, point and bob their bills, flick their wings open and fan their tails so the yellow or red undersides flash. Rivals and courting pairs do the same dance, so the call means either a fight or a wedding.

The call: a loud kleeer

The everyday call is a single loud kleeer or klee-yer, a sharp whistle that slides downward. You hear it from a bird flushed off a lawn, from one landing on a snag, and at random through the day in every season. Flickers also call in flight. Once learned, the kleeer is one of the easiest bird sounds in North America to pick out, and it is often the first clue that the brown bird that just bounded away from the sidewalk was a woodpecker.

When and where you hear it

Flickers live from Alaska and Canada south through the entire United States to Nicaragua. There are two forms: the Yellow-shafted Flicker of the East and North, and the Red-shafted Flicker of the West, which meet and interbreed on the Great Plains. Northern Yellow-shafted birds are strong migrants, streaming east and then south each fall with big flights along the Atlantic coast, while Red-shafted birds mostly just drop from the mountains to the lowlands. Across most of the country a flicker is a year-round bird, but the long laugh belongs to spring and early summer.

This is the woodpecker you see on the ground. Flickers hop across lawns, pastures and forest floors hunting ants, and they probably eat more ants than any other North American bird; ants can be almost half the diet, licked up with a tongue that reaches two inches past the bill. They also take beetles, termites and caterpillars, and in fall and winter more than half the food is fruit and seeds: poison ivy, dogwood, sumac, cherry, hackberry and elderberry. They need open ground plus some trees, so open forests, woodlots, groves, farmland, towns and suburbs suit them, and dense unbroken forest does not.

The nest is a cavity in dead wood, often pine, cottonwood or willow, sometimes a utility pole, with an entrance about three inches across and a chamber more than a foot deep. Both sexes dig it and both incubate the five to eight white eggs for a little under two weeks; the young leave after about four weeks. European Starlings compete hard for freshly dug flicker holes. In Warble the flicker is the state-bird card of the Alabama album.

The drum

Flickers drum in short bursts in spring to mark territory, and they are famous for choosing metal. A chimney cap, a stovepipe, a gutter or a transformer box amplifies the roll far beyond what a dead limb can, and a flicker will return to the same loud spot morning after morning. The drumming is a fast, even burst, and the bird pairs it with the long wick-wick-wick series, which does the rest of the advertising.

What it looks like

A big, brown woodpecker, 11 to 12 inches long with a wingspan of 17 to 20 inches, that does not look like a woodpecker at first. The back is brown barred with black, the belly beige with round black spots, and there is a black crescent across the chest. In flight the white rump flashes and the underwings and tail light up yellow (Yellow-shafted) or salmon pink (Red-shafted). Eastern birds have a tan face, gray crown and a red crescent on the nape, and the male wears a black mustache; western birds have a gray face, brown crown and no red nape, and the male's mustache is red. Females of both forms have no mustache.

Alabama calls it the yellowhammer and adopted it as the state bird in 1927. The nickname goes back to the Civil War, when it was applied to Confederate soldiers from Alabama, and it is only one of more than a hundred folk names the bird has collected, among them clape, harry-wicket, heigh-ho, wake-up, yarrup and gawker bird.

Birds that sound similar

• 
  Pileated Woodpecker

  The Pileated Woodpecker's cuk-cuk-cuk-cuk is the flicker's closest match, but it is louder, deeper and more resonant, and it rises and then falls in pitch while the flicker's laugh stays level.

• 
  Red-bellied Woodpecker

  The Red-bellied Woodpecker's churrrr is a rolling trill, and its chuck-chuck-chuck is short and descending. Neither runs on as long or as evenly as a flicker's wick-wick-wick.

• 
  Red-headed Woodpecker

  The Red-headed Woodpecker's kweeer is a single hoarse descending call much like the flicker's kleeer, but rougher. The flicker's is a cleaner whistle.

Where the Northern Flicker card lives

In Warble the same bird can be an easy card in one state and a prized one in another, because each album ranks its birds by how often people really report them there. The Northern Flicker appears in 48 state albums:

Questions people ask

Written by the Warble team from the sources above. Updated September 30, 2026.