Birdwatching for Woodpeckers

Last winter we caught sight of a pair of pileated woodpeckers moving through the woods. We’ve seen that pair off and on during the year in flight; also there is hardly a day when you don’t hear them working over some of the dead trees in the hollow or up on the hill out back.

There are a couple of other woodpecker species around the Hawksbill Cabin – while I don’t usually have the phone cam handy, I’ve seen yellow bellied sapsuckers for one. This photo of the trunk of our apple tree with the suet basket has signs of them – generations of the birds – where they have drilled little sap holes in the trunk.

The birds eat the sap, but they also eat the bugs that are attracted to it. The only problem here is that infection and disease can enter the tree through these holes, but the apple tree doesn’t seem to be any worse for wear and tear.

I’ve only seen the male sapsucker, with the red crest and the little red kerchief around his neck. This is a Wikipedia photo.

The downy is the other woodpecker species I’ve seen around. A few weeks back, while I was doing my wood chopping, I saw a small flock of three of them flitting around the apple tree. They are a small, sparrow-sized bird, and these three were hopping around from branch to branch chasing and scolding each other. Here is a photo I happened to catch on Sunday, with one of the downies clinging to the suet basket, along with the normal phone cam quality caveat.

My field guide says that the downy woodpeckers will join small flocks of the other birds that over winter here – nuthatches and chickadees, mainly. We put seed feeders up for these, so we’ll take care of the downies now, too.