We Love Visitors: Pileated Woodpecker

For as long as I can remember, Pileated Woodpeckers have been regular visitors to our yard and the woods around us. Dead tree limbs and old stumps are some of their favorite feasting places, and we intentionally leave things like that in our landscape because they do attract so many interesting species of birds, insects, and fungi.

Spotting these beautiful creatures is a completely different ballgame than successfully photographing them, though. They're fast and nervous, ready to fly away at the slightest perceived threat, including noisy dogs, passing cars, and humans with cameras.

Last year, Jack managed to snap some great shots of one during an ice storm.

A few days ago, I got the photo at the top of this post from the shelter of the house - not bad for a shot through our dirty sliding glass door, I think.

Read about Pileated Woodpeckers at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology:

All About Birds

I don't even know how to catch-y'all-up since the last blog post.

Let's start with the weather --

Here in the midstate, we've had a couple of apocalyptic ice-storms, about a hundred missed days of school, and more confusion about climate change than can fit into a standard root cellar. The end is near or not, depending on whether you see the glass as half full or half empty and a bunch of other stuff. 

So, here we are -- 

February has passed and a handful of days into March, we're told to prepare for more bad weather, and I'm tired of it. Everybody's tired of it. 

Three years have passed without anything significantly wintry happening, but in the course of two weeks, entire communities on the Cumberland Plateau have been devastated by ice storms and history-making winter. 

My eloquent friend, Larry, described nearby Monterey as "an icy hellscape," and based on the photos I've seen from that area, he's on the bullseye.

Albeit inconvenient, the ice storm provided some remarkable opportunities, not the least of which is this photo Jack shot of a pileated woodpecker, feasting on frosty dogwood berries in the neighbor's front yard.

Yeah, that's a Christmas card.