Endangered
Okinawa Woodpecker
Dendrocopos noguchii
The Okinawa woodpecker (ノグチゲラ, Noguchigera) is a woodpecker endemic to the Okinawa Prefecture of Japan.
Appearance
It is dark brown in color with red-tipped feathers. It has white spots on the primaries. The head is a paler brown, with a dark red crown on the male and a blackish-brown one on the female.
This is a medium-sized (31 cm), dark woodpecker.
Range and habitat
This woodpecker primarily lives in undisturbed mature primary forests. Mostly in the subtropical evergreen forests of Yambaru's central mountains. It can occasionally be seen in secondary forests as well. The Okinawa woodpecker (ノグチゲラ, Noguchigera) is a woodpecker endemic to the Okinawa Prefecture of Japan.
The lives of the birds themselves are also put at risk by the flights of V-22 Ospreys over the island.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
The Okinawa woodpecker prefers to forage nearer to the ground, mostly below 5 metres (16 ft). Its diet consists of large arthropods, moths, centipedes, beetle larvae, spiders, and even gecko nestlings.
It will occasionally forage for fruits, berries, acorns, other nuts, and seeds. Their breeding habitat is subtropical, evergreen broad-leaved forest that is at least 30 years old on Okinawa Island, with tall trees of more than 20 cm in diameter. Laying occurs from late Feb to May, typically during March and April, and chicks are present in the nest until June.
In crisis
This woodpecker has a single tiny population that is threatened by habitat loss of mature forest due to logging, dam construction, agriculture, military and golf course developments. The current population is estimated at less than 600. While listed as critically endangered since 1994, in 2024 the Okinawa woodpecker was downlisted to endangered because the previously declining population trend has stabilized.
The Okinawa woodpecker usually lives in threatened by the construction of six new American helipads located about 9.5 km Southwest of the Yanbaru forest of Takae.
Okinawa Woodpecker is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Okinawa Woodpecker, Wikidata item Q21948535. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
