# The woodpeckers of Băneasa Forest

*Seven species on the edge of Bucharest, each with its own sound*

Romania has ten species of woodpecker. Seven have been found in Băneasa, an oak forest on the northern edge of Bucharest that is not yet a protected area. You can tell them apart by how they drum or call.

## Seven woodpeckers, and how each one makes itself heard

Woodpeckers do not sing as other birds do. To hold a territory and attract a mate, most of them drum: they strike a dry, resonant branch with the bill about twenty times a second. Each species has its own length and rhythm.
Below, every vertical line is one strike of the bill in a real recording. All rows share one time scale, so the short drummers and the long ones can be compared.
Each species’ card also gives the number of public records made inside the forest. The list of seven comes from the scientific study by Asociația Parcul Natural București (the Bucharest Nature Park Association, APNB), which is campaigning for the forest to be protected. Four of the seven are in Annex I of the EU Birds Directive, the list of species whose habitat member states must take special measures to conserve.

### Great spotted woodpecker (*Dendrocopos major*)

- **How it sounds:** Short and speeding up: on average 13 strikes in two thirds of a second, the gaps shrinking towards the end. It has no territorial call; the drum roll does that job.
- **What it needs:** Dry wood that resonates. Each pair keeps a few dead branches or trunks in its territory and returns to them to drum, and it usually digs a new nest hole every year.
- **In Băneasa:** 24 public records from 11 observers, between 2006 and 2026. It is the woodpecker with the most records in the forest.

### Syrian woodpecker (*Dendrocopos syriacus*)

- **How it sounds:** Like the great spotted, but it lasts longer: about 19 strikes in one second, also speeding up. It has no territorial call either.
- **What it needs:** It lives mostly among people, in orchards, parks and gardens. It reached Romania in the twentieth century: it was seen near Buzău, north-east of Bucharest, in 1931, and had crossed the Carpathians by the 1950s.
- **In Băneasa:** One public record in the forest, in January 2024; the species is also in the association’s study.

### Middle spotted woodpecker (*Dendrocoptes medius*)

- **How it sounds:** It hardly drums at all. It announces its territory with a nasal call repeated slowly, rather like a cat mewing.
- **What it needs:** Mature forest with dead wood. It rarely breaks into wood for food: three quarters of the time it searches and probes the cracked bark of thick trees. In Switzerland, pairs with more large oaks (over 36 cm across) made do with a smaller territory, and middle spotted woodpecker numbers fell most in the oak woods that became more isolated.
- **In Băneasa:** 18 public records from 10 observers, between 2006 and 2024. Among the woodpeckers it has the second highest number of records.

### Lesser spotted woodpecker (*Dryobates minor*)

- **How it sounds:** Long and even: about 21 strikes in just over a second, without speeding up. It is the smallest woodpecker in Europe, 14–16 cm long.
- **What it needs:** Dead trees or dry limbs to nest in. Its hole has an entrance of 3–3.5 cm, which later suits small birds that have no use for the wide holes of the other woodpeckers.
- **In Băneasa:** 12 public records from 5 observers, between 2006 and 2024.

### Black woodpecker (*Dryocopus martius*)

- **How it sounds:** The longest roll and the slowest rhythm of the five species that drum often: about 31 strikes in almost two seconds, some 17 a second.
- **What it needs:** Tall, thick trees. It is the largest woodpecker in Europe, 45–50 cm long, and digs the largest holes any bird makes on the continent. In southern Germany, cameras at 72 such holes recorded 28 species of vertebrate.
- **In Băneasa:** 3 public records from 2 observers, between 2006 and 2022.

### Green woodpecker (*Picus viridis*)

- **How it sounds:** Its call is a run of loud notes, like a laugh. It rarely drums.
- **What it needs:** Ants, the bulk of its diet, which it looks for in meadow anthills, and tall dead or soft-wooded trees to nest in. In the photograph it hangs under a dead limb covered in bracket fungus.
- **In Băneasa:** 7 public records from 4 observers, between 2022 and 2024.

### Grey-headed woodpecker (*Picus canus*)

- **How it sounds:** Long, even and fast: about 31 strikes in a second and a half, some 20 a second. For the same number of strikes the black woodpecker takes almost two seconds.
- **What it needs:** Natural, unaltered forest. The Romanian Ornithological Society describes it as a species with strict requirements, threatened by the removal of dead, diseased and old trees.
- **In Băneasa:** 3 public records from 3 observers, between 2006 and 2022.

## The usual drum roll of the five species that drum often

| Species | Strikes | Duration | Strikes per second | Rhythm |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Great spotted woodpecker | 13 | 0.65 s | 20 | speeds up |
| Syrian woodpecker | 19.4 | 0.97 s | 20 | speeds up |
| Lesser spotted woodpecker | 21.1 | 1.16 s | 18 | even |
| Black woodpecker | 31 | 1.86 s | 17 | speeds up a little |
| Grey-headed woodpecker | 31.5 | 1.57 s | 20 | even |

Means of 8 to 832 rolls per species, analysed by Florentin, Dutoit and Verlinden (2016). Strikes per second is the number of strikes divided by the duration. For the Syrian woodpecker the mean rests on only eight rolls.

## Who moves into the holes

Many forest birds and mammals raise their young in tree holes but cannot dig one. They are left with holes made by woodpeckers and holes formed by decay in old trees.

In southern Germany, researchers put cameras on 72 black woodpecker holes. At 69 of them at least one animal was filmed, and 28 species of vertebrate appeared in all: some nested, others only visited, among them predators after the young. Sixteen of those species are also recorded at Băneasa, in the study or in public records: black woodpecker, grey-headed woodpecker, green woodpecker, middle spotted woodpecker, great spotted woodpecker, tawny owl, common buzzard, jackdaw, great tit, blue tit, nuthatch, starling, jay, collared flycatcher, red squirrel, common noctule bat.

Not every hole is made by a woodpecker. In Poland’s primeval Białowieża Forest, only 16% of the nests of birds that cannot dig were in holes dug by woodpeckers or other birds; the rest were in holes formed by decay. The authors of that study say the future of hole-dwelling animals depends largely on one thing: forests no longer losing their old trees.

## Birds recorded in the forest that are missing from the study’s table

The study submitted to the Romanian Academy lists 49 species of bird “known so far” in the forest. Separately, between 2006 and 2026, 46 observers sent 563 records of birds from inside the forest to the recording platforms eBird, Observation.org, iNaturalist and Birda, where anyone can log the birds they see.

Those records include 42 of the study’s 49 species, among them all seven woodpeckers. They also include species the table lacks. The ones below have at least five records, made on at least four different days.

| Species | Records | Days | Observers | Months |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Blackcap (*Sylvia atricapilla*) | 14 | 9 | 7 | April and May |
| Collared flycatcher (*Ficedula albicollis*) | 10 | 6 | 5 | April and May |
| Golden oriole (*Oriolus oriolus*) | 7 | 6 | 7 | April, May and June |
| Feral pigeon (*Columba livia*) | 5 | 4 | 5 | January, May and July |
| Spotted flycatcher (*Muscicapa striata*) | 5 | 4 | 5 | April and May |

## What has been built around the forest since 1990

The forest has three blocks, separated by roads and housing: one west of the DN1 (the main road north out of Bucharest), one in the middle, reaching the city zoo, and one to the east, towards Pipera and Tunari in the neighbouring county of Ilfov. The area proposed for protection covers 1,332 hectares, of which 1,221.5 are forest.

In the one-kilometre strip around the three blocks, buildings covered 104 ha in 1990 and 413 ha in 2020: four times as much. These are European Commission estimates made from satellite images.

- 1990: 104 ha
- 2000: 160 ha
- 2010: 293 ha
- 2020: 413 ha

### Who owns it, and where protection stands

According to the study, 35.9% of the forest is publicly owned and 64.1% privately owned. The proposed status, that of a nature park, does not change who owns the land; the rules for each plot would be set in a management plan, in consultation with the owners.

- The association has submitted the scientific study supporting the proposal to the Romanian Academy, whose commission gives its opinion on protected areas; the current version is dated September 2026.
- The local council of Sector 1, the Bucharest district that contains part of the forest, backed the proposal in two decisions, in January and April 2025.
- The authorities of Voluntari and Tunari, a town and a commune in Ilfov county that contain the rest of the forest, were informed in September 2025. Their councils have not yet been asked for a decision.
- Consultation with private owners has begun but is not finished.

Separately, according to the study, Romania’s environment ministry has begun the procedure for declaring Natura 2000 sites (the EU’s network of protected areas) on or next to the forest.

In a survey of 816 people published in 2025 by Dușcu and Rîșnoveanu and cited in the study, 86.4% supported declaring the forest a protected natural area.

Asociația Parcul Natural București, the association that won protection for the Văcărești wetland in the south of the city, is collecting signatures for Băneasa. According to the association, more than 30,000 people had signed by early October 2026. <https://protejam-baneasa.parculnaturalbucuresti.ro/>

## When to hear them, and what else there is to see

Drumming is heard mostly in late winter and spring. Of 685 recordings with drumming by the seven species, made in Romania and 12 other countries, from Germany to Turkey, 72% date from February, March and April. In autumn, woodpeckers give themselves away mostly by their calls and by the tapping they make while feeding, which has no rhythm.

The association has laid out a biodiversity trail in the forest with seven information panels; the third is about birds. The Pădurea Băneasa bus stop is on Aleea Privighetorilor, on the southern edge of the middle block.

## Where the numbers come from

**The seven species.** The list is the one in the scientific study by Asociația Parcul Natural București (Table 6, 49 bird species; where a row’s Romanian and scientific names do not match, the Romanian one was used). All seven also appear in public records from inside the forest. Romania’s other three woodpeckers are the wryneck, which neither drums nor digs its own hole, the white-backed woodpecker of beech forests and the three-toed woodpecker of mountain conifer forests.
**The strikes.** Each drum roll drawn here comes from a recording on xeno-canto, the public archive of bird sounds, chosen for a clean roll: from Romania for the great spotted woodpecker, from Hungary, Poland and Germany for the others. Recordings whose licence does not allow editing were left out. The strikes were detected automatically, from the peaks of energy in the sound, and checked by eye on each recording. Where a strike is too faint to detect, the row has a gap, and the faintest closing strikes may be missing. Each species’ “usual” numbers are the means published by Florentin, Dutoit and Verlinden (2016).
**Matching your roll.** The number of strikes and the change of rhythm (the gaps in the second half against those in the first) are compared with the means of the five species that drum often. When two species are equally close, the result names both. It is a recognition game, not an identification.
**Public records.** 563 records of birds from GBIF, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, downloaded on 8 October 2026, lying inside the three forest outlines in OpenStreetMap. An OpenStreetMap outline is not the boundary of the proposed protected area.
**Buildings around the forest.** Built-up area from the GHS-BUILT-S dataset of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, summed over the cells lying up to 1 km outside the forest outlines.
**Who did what.** Asociația Parcul Natural București (the Bucharest Nature Park Association) proposed the subject and supplied the study, the photographs, the films and the forest recordings. The text, the calculations and the conclusions are Marius Comper’s.

- [Asociația Parcul Natural București (G. Bouroș, V. Cioflec, D. Bărbulescu, A. Cîșlariu), Studiu de fundamentare științifică a ariei naturale protejate Pădurea Băneasa, septembrie 2026](https://parculnaturalbucuresti.ro/rewilding/padurea-baneasa/)
- [Florentin, Dutoit & Verlinden (2016), Identification of European woodpecker species in audio recordings from their drumming rolls, Ecological Informatics 35](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoinf.2016.08.006)
- [Florentin, Dutoit & Verlinden (2020), Detection and identification of European woodpeckers with deep convolutional neural networks, Ecological Informatics 55](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoinf.2019.101023)
- [Societatea Ornitologică Română, Păsări din România: familia Picidae](https://pasaridinromania.sor.ro/specii?familie=95)
- [Directiva 2009/147/CE privind conservarea păsărilor sălbatice, Anexa I](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2009/147/oj)
- [Zahner, Bauer & Kaphegyi (2017), Are Black Woodpecker tree cavities in temperate Beech forests an answer to depredation risk?, Journal of Ornithology 158](https://doi.org/10.1007/s10336-017-1467-2)
- [Cabrera, Monnet, Bouteaux, Doutau, Denis & Paillet (2022), Over the hills and far away: linking landscape factors with cavity excavation on living forest trees by the Black Woodpecker, bioRxiv](https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.06.22.497197)
- [Cockle, Martin & Wesołowski (2011), Woodpeckers, decay, and the future of cavity-nesting vertebrate communities worldwide, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 9](https://doi.org/10.1890/110013)
- [Pasinelli (2000), Oaks and only oaks? Habitat structure and home range size of the middle spotted woodpecker, Biological Conservation 93](https://doi.org/10.1016/S0006-3207(99)00137-8)
- [Pasinelli & Hegelbach (1997), Characteristics of trees preferred by foraging Middle Spotted Woodpecker in northern Switzerland, Ardea 85](https://avibirds.com/wp-content/uploads/pdf/middelste-bonte-specht4.pdf)
- [Bühlmann & Pasinelli (2012), Analyse des Bestandsrückgangs beim Mittelspecht im Kanton Zürich, Der Ornithologische Beobachter 109](https://ala-schweiz.ch/images/stories/pdf/ob/2012_109/OrnitholBeob_2012_109_73_Buehlmann.pdf)
- [Cantarero et al. (2014), The significance of nest structure and nesting material for hole-nesting passerines: Nuthatches, Acta Ornithologica 49](https://doi.org/10.3161/173484714X687037)
- [Michalczuk (2014), Expansion of the Syrian Woodpecker in Europe and Western Asia, Ornis Polonica 55](https://www.ornis-polonica.pl/issues/OP_2014_3/OP_2014_3_1.pdf)
- [Michalczuk & Michalczuk (2016), Habitat preferences of Picidae woodpeckers in the agricultural landscape of SE Poland, North-Western Journal of Zoology 12](https://biozoojournals.ro/nwjz/content/v12n1/nwjz_e151603_Michalczuk.pdf)
- [Turner, Gorman & Alder (2022), The acoustic communication of the Eurasian Green Woodpecker, Ornis Hungarica 30](https://doi.org/10.2478/orhu-2022-0017)
- [GBIF.org: eBird Observation Dataset, Observation.org, iNaturalist Research-grade Observations, Birda](https://www.gbif.org/occurrence/search?taxon_key=212&geometry=POLYGON((26.04%2044.5,26.15%2044.5,26.15%2044.555,26.04%2044.555,26.04%2044.5)))
- [xeno-canto: bird sounds from around the world](https://xeno-canto.org/)
- [Pesaresi & Politis (2023), GHS-BUILT-S R2023A, European Commission, Joint Research Centre](https://doi.org/10.2905/9F06F36F-4B11-47EC-ABB0-4F8B7B1D72EA)
- [OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL)](https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/13645219)

Researched, curated and published by Marius Comper · https://mariuscomper.uk/padurea-baneasa/en/