In turn, several species rely on black woodpeckers to secondarily reside in the holes made in trees by them.

The black woodpecker was formally described by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus in 1758 in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae under the binomial name Picus martius.

[6] The juvenile black woodpecker is similar but is less glossy, with a duller red crown and a paler grey throat and bill .

[10] The piercing yellow eyes and manic, high-pitched calls of the black woodpecker have made it the villain of fairy tales throughout its range.

[7][10] The range of the black woodpecker spreads east from Spain across the whole of Europe, excluding Great Britain, Ireland, and northern Scandinavia.

[12] The woodpecker feeds by using its bill to hammer on dead trees to dig out carpenter ants and wood-boring beetle grubs.

[13] Like all woodpeckers, this species has a specially adapted neck containing very strong muscles, which allow it to endlessly hack away at tree bark.

In order to position itself correctly, it has short, stumpy legs, as well as long, sharp claws and very stiff tail feathers.

[8] The breeding pair take it in turns to incubate the eggs, also sharing duties of feeding and brooding the chicks once they have hatched.

At one point, when much of Europe and Asia was deforested, this species declined and in some areas is still struggling today, including in the Pyrenees.

[19] Western jackdaws (Coloeus monedula) are notably regular usurpers of this species' nest holes and a potential predator of eggs and small nestlings.

The municipality of Nurmijärvi in Uusimaa, Finland, has adopted the black woodpecker as the title bird of the municipality, because in addition to being a relatively common bird in the locality, it also appears in the literature of Aleksis Kivi, a Finnish national author, originally from Nurmijärvi.