The Black Woodpecker (Dryocopus martius) is Europe's largest woodpecker — roughly crow-sized at 45–57 cm long, with a wingspan of 64–84 cm and a weight of 250–370 grams. It is entirely black with a long neck and a large, chisel-shaped bill; the male has a fully red crown, while the female shows red only on the nape. Its laughing call, "krri-krri-krri-krri," carries far in flight, and a long "klii-yäää" is given from a perch, while its drumming is unusually long and powerful — 2–3 seconds and 40–60 strikes — compared with smaller woodpeckers.
Found throughout Sweden as a resident species, the Black Woodpecker numbers 25,000–35,000 pairs and holds large territories of 200–400 hectares in old-growth forest with big trees, preferring spruce and pine. Its main food is carpenter ants living in dead stumps and logs, which it exposes by hacking out the huge, rectangular holes that are one of the clearest signs of its presence in a forest, along with beetle larvae and large beetles. For nesting it excavates an oval hole, about 12 x 8 cm, dug 30–50 cm into the trunk of a large aspen, beech or old pine, where the female lays 4–6 eggs incubated for 12–14 days. A pair rarely reuses the same hole, and the abandoned cavities go on to serve other species for decades — Stock Doves, Tengmalm's Owls, Pygmy Owls, pine martens and squirrels all depend on them — making the Black Woodpecker a genuine keystone species of the boreal forest. It remains on territory year-round, and in winter is often located by its fresh rectangular excavations in dead wood, though hard cold can push it briefly beyond its usual range.
Read about this species in Swedish →