[4] The hairy woodpecker was described and illustrated with a hand-coloured plate by the English naturalist Mark Catesby in his The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands which was published between 1729 and 1732.

[5] When in 1766 the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus updated his Systema Naturae for the twelfth edition, he included the downy woodpecker, coined the binomial name Picus villosus and cited Catesby's book.

[8] The hairy woodpecker was formerly usually placed in either Dendrocopos or Picoides but a molecular phylogenetic study published in 2015 found that these genera did not form monophyletic groups.

[9] In the revised generic classification, the hairy woodpecker was moved to the genus Leuconotopicus that was erected by the French ornithologist Alfred Malherbe in 1845.

The hairy woodpecker inhabits mature deciduous forests[2][18] in the Bahamas, Canada, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, and the United States.

They are a predator of the European corn borer, a moth that costs the US agriculture industry more than $1 billion annually in crop losses and population control.