In parts of its range the Acorn Woodpecker does not construct a granary tree, but instead stores acorns in natural holes and cracks in bark. Woodpeckers put 220 kg (485 lb) of acorns into a wooden water tank in Arizona. Occasionally the woodpecker will put acorns into places where it cannot get them out. The Acorn Woodpecker will use human-made structures to store acorns, drilling holes in fenceposts, utility poles, buildings, and even automobile radiators.
One granary tree may have up to 50,000 holes in it, each of which is filled with an acorn in autumn.
Acorns typically are stored in holes drilled into a single tree, called a granary tree.
All members of an Acorn Woodpecker group spend large amounts of time storing acorns. Several different individuals of each sex may breed within one family, with up to seven breeding males and three breeding females in one group. Family groups hold territories, and young woodpeckers stay with their parents for several years and help the parents raise more young. The Acorn Woodpecker has a very complicated social system. In 1923, American ornithologist William Leon Dawson called the dapper Acorn Woodpecker “our native aristocrat.” Dawson wrote: “He is unruffled by the operations of the human plebs in whatever disguise…Wigwams, haciendas, or university halls, what matter such frivolities, if only one may go calmly on with the main business of life, which is indubitably the hoarding of acorns.”.
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