The Four Woodpecker Yard

As I wrote a couple of days ago, I have now seen my first red-bellied woodpecker. Since then I have seen it several more times. What a lovely bird, and so interesting to see a new bird that is so woodpeckerish, and yet strikingly different from the woodpeckers I know. Different voice, different wingbeats, different posture landing and taking off from the trunk of a tree.

I could see this particularly well because the woodpeckers I know have been coming around too: the downy, the hairy and the pileated. A pair of downys have been frequenting the yard and the feeder, a hairy drops by quite regularly, and finally I got to see the pileated who had been leaving such clear sign in the woods just below the yard.

This is the first sign I saw when I arrived--lots of pileated work here!

These were made the other day--the occasion of my first sighting of the bird this week.

This morning work began on a new hole in the same tree. And you can also see our new snow.
It occurs to me that I also saw a northern flicker the first day I was here, but that's not such a woodpeckerish woodpecker, and anyway, it's a crazy bird to see in winter--this year is the first time I have--and always down here, not up in Thomasburg. Anyway if I counted it, that would make five.