Downy Woodpecker painting: Audubon's plate and other classic portraits

Audubon’s plate: plate 112, “Downy Woodpecker”

The vine is the ramping trumpet-flower, Bignonia capreolata, which Audubon says hummingbirds visit. He wrote that across the United States the Downy was best known as the Sap-sucker, and he believed its neat rows of holes in the bark did trees good, though he admitted few farmers agreed with him.

In Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas he noticed wintering birds whose breast and belly were so blackened by soot, from trunks charred when the grass was burned, that you could take them for another species. Of its easygoing ways he wrote: “It seems, in fact, to accommodate itself to circumstances.”

Story: Audubon’s Ornithological Biography, vol. 2 (1834). See plate 112 free at Audubon.org.

More classic portraits, free to see

• John James Audubon, The Birds of America, octavo edition (1840–44), plate 263: “Downy Woodpecker”. Free scan (New York Public Library Digital Collections)
• Louis Agassiz Fuertes, for Elon H. Eaton’s Birds of New York (1910–14), plate 59: “Downy Woodpecker”, with the Hairy Woodpecker. Free scan (Internet Archive)

About the Downy Woodpecker

• Downy Woodpeckers can feed on thin twigs and weed stalks as well as on big tree trunks. (Source: National Audubon Society)

The oldest known wild Downy Woodpecker lived at least 11 years and 11 months: it was banded in California in 1985 and found there again in 1996. That is a record from bird banding, not a typical lifespan. (Source: USGS Bird Banding Laboratory, 2025 longevity table.) How long do wild birds live?

Buying a print?

An original plate 112 is a hand-colored sheet about 26 by 38 inches, printed in Britain in 1827–38; many prints sold today are reproductions or small 1840s octavo prints. How to tell an original from a reproduction.