Professor Beal made the following report regarding this woodpecker: “The red-bellied woodpecker ranges over the eastern United States as far west as central Texas and eastern Colorado and as far north as New York, southern Ontario, Michigan, and southern Minnesota. It breeds throughout this range and appears to be irregularly migratory. It appears to go north of its breeding range sometimes to spend the winter. Four stomachs, collected in November and December, were received from Canada, and in eight years’ residence in central Iowa the writer found the species abundant every winter, but never saw one in the breeding season. It is rather more of a forest bird than some of the other woodpeckers, but is frequently seen in open or thinly timbered country. In the northern part of its range it appears to prefer deciduous growth, but in the South is very common in pine forests.

“Ants are a fairly constant article of diet. The most are taken during the warmer months. Evidently this bird does not dig all the ants which it eats from decaying wood, like the downy woodpecker, but, like the flickers, collects them from the ground and the bark of trees.

“In Florida, the bird has been observed to eat oranges to an injurious extent. It attacks the over-ripe fruit and pecks holes in it and sometimes completely devours it. The fruit selected is that which is dead ripe or partly decayed, so it is not often that the damage is serious. The bird sometimes attacks the trunks of the orange trees as well as others and does some harm. The contents of the stomachs, however, show that wild fruits are preferred, and probably only when these have been replaced by cultivated varieties is any mischief done.”[78]