The smallest woodpecker in North America and a year-round resident of woodlands, parks, and backyards. It forages acrobatically over trunks, limbs, and small twigs of deciduous trees, gleaning and hammering for beetle larvae, ants, caterpillars, and other bark and wood insects. Both sexes excavate nest cavities in dead limbs and standing snags, often in fungus-softened wood, which makes retaining dead wood a direct habitat action. In winter it shifts to more tapping and excavating, working weed and seedhead stems such as goldenrod to extract gall-fly larvae and supplementing its diet with seeds and berries.

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