This is very obviously a male as indicated by the red head.

In South Carolina Downy Woodpeckers were very common.  Here’s a female.

The abundance of woodpeckers in SC is great because I was able to hold out for some nice, close pictures instead of simply taking a confirming shot.  You can even see her brown eyes in this one:

I like this picture because she blends so well with the tree.

One other thing that we don’t have a lot of in Utah is buildings with skull roofs.

That’s right, a skull roof.

As a vegetarian I can’t imagine killing all these beautiful animals.  But to each his own I guess.

She was trying to drink from the sugar water for feeding hummingbirds.  This woodpecker is female because male Gila Woodpeckers have a red cap on their heads.

Here’s a blurry picture of a male for comparison.

You wouldn’t think that the feeder was designed well enough for the woodpecker to drink, but it was good enough that there was a fight between the woodpecker and a female Bullock’s Oriole over the feeder.

He looks crazy, right?

These woodpeckers are called Acorn Woodpeckers because they drill holes and create stashes of acorns.  Unfortunately it’s impossible to see in these pictures, but the male has a red cap that meets the white in the front so the pattern goes from red to white to his beak.  You can see what I’m talking about here.  Below is the red cap on a female Acorn Woodpecker.

The females have a black area between the white feathers and the cap.

I really love woodpeckers.  We have Downy and/or Hairy Woodpeckers (it’s hard to tell without pictures) in my neighborhood.  I saw one while biking home the other day and I heard one this morning.  We also get flickers although I haven’t seem them around lately.  Maybe they’re too busy making babies.  Janie has an AWESOME post about how flickers are cavity nesters and baby flickers sound just like bees to keep the predators away.  Go read it!

photo by Jon

In case you’re not aware, Mary Jo has some real assholes for neighbors that are giving her grief for having too many birders on her property.  Now, I saw her property and this isn’t like a busy city where your neighbor’s house is four feet away from hers.  Everyone has quite a bit of land.  After nine years of having birders come, suddenly there was an issue and now Mary Jo can’t advertise her place as a location for birders to visit and, as a result, she can’t make a living from people visiting her property.

This is all because the road that is used to access her property is a private road with an easement that allows others to travel on the road to reach their houses.  This is probably the one time in my life that I wish I specialized in property law.  But enough about this sadness, let’s talk about woodpeckers.

photo by Jon

When Conner is really interested in something, his eyes roll into head as he focuses on the object.  This woodpecker was doing the same thing.  I guess suet is really exciting.

photo by Jon

This is a female; the males have a little red on their head.  I have a somewhat blurry picture of the male.  If you want to see a fantastic picture of the male go here.

After I took the shots of the female on the suet feeder I said, “Hey bird, show me your back.”  She was very obliging.

She was really used to people.  I was less than four feet away from her and had adjust my lens to a 300mm to get all of her in the picture.  At 500mm, though, you sure can see a lot of detail.

Doesn’t he look like there are quill feathers mixed in with the red?  The females have a more even red cap on their heads.

I love how the speckled feathers blend in with the wood.

Did you know that sapsuckers are a kind of woodpecker?  I need to go change my categories now!

American Flicker

I started in my favorite part in Heber, UT.  This is where I saw my first Sandhill Crane and moose.  This time I saw an American Flicker and a Scrub Jay.

Even though Salt Lake City was completely dry, Heber is at a higher elevation and therefore had a lot of snow left.

Next we moved on to another section of the Provo River Valley.  Now, this section of Heber has tons of birds in the summer.  It’s teeming with waxwings, warblers, osprey, robins and more!  This time was less busy.  I saw a Red-Tailed Hawk.

And Black-Billed Magpies.  Although those are present everywhere in Utah.

Heber being a bust, Jon suggested that we cover the Jordanelle Reservoir and the Rockport Reservoir on the way home.  The east side of the Jordanelle Reservoir had the most activity.  At first I was getting excited over mallards but then I saw a juvenile Bald Eagle!

This is probably a third-year Bald Eagle.  The head doesn’t start to turn white until the third year and by the fourth year the head is closer to being completely white.  There were also deer.

I also saw dippers but I want to save those pictures because they deserve a separate post.  Next we stopped at the Rockport State Park, which was very very cold.

I was determined to get to the part of the reservoir that had ducks and geese.  Of course the picture below is as close as I got because ducks won’t let you get very close before they fly away.

At this point I turned around and realized how long I had been walking.

Do you see the jeep in that picture?  Hmm, let me clip a little bit of the picture.

So I got a good amount of exercise, managed to trip and hurt my foot (it’s okay now) and have sworn that I won’t walk in snow over a foot deep for extended periods of time again.  I can’t wait for Spring!

What, you can’t make him out?  It’s a good thing that I’ve already seen one before.  Because that was the only picture I had of the Pileated Woodpecker.  The third kind of woodpecker that I saw was the Red-Bellied Woodpecker.  He’s the most striking of the woodpeckers because of the white stripes on his back.

The name Red-Bellied Woodpecker is a little odd because their bellies are pretty pale.  The females have red at the bottom of their breasts so maybe they’re named for the females.  But they shouldn’t be called red headed because their entire heads are not red, like the actually named Red-Headed Woodpecker.

These were the most abundant of the woodpeckers.  They kept showing up in the trees.

This is a very easy identification.  You see, he’s a woodpecker with a red head.

These pictures were taken in Georgia.  All my birding trips were so pleasurable.  The skies were bright blue, the weather was warm, there were birds everywhere.  Utah is already experiencing the yearly inversion and it’s snowed at least three times since October.  This guy was in my mother’s backyard.  And then he got puffy!

The woodpecker was so relaxed that he preened in front of me.  He knew I was there; he looked at me several times and yet he was not at all concerned.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a picture of the front of the woodpecker, which is sad because the bottom of his read head is lined in black.  You can see a little bit of it here.

Montanagirl has a great picture of a Red-Headed Woodpecker with a bug in his beak.  Check it out!

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The second time I saw a Flicker, I had been playing with the ISO settings in an attempt to get sharper pictures.  What I did not realize as I was taking the pictures is that cranking the ISO on your camera makes your pictures incredibly grainy.  Behold!

The third time I saw a Northern Flicker I was biking on 700 East and I saw him in a tree.  He was less than ten feet away from me.  I had my camera on my bike but I new that by the time I got the camera out he’d be gone.  So I simply enjoyed looking at him and his underbelly spots.  The fourth time I got a picture.

Flickers are in the woodpecker family.  During breeding season they get really excited, start tapping on wood and then make this incredibly loud call.  The males have a red stripe below his eyes that is called a moustache (malar).

The females do not.

They don’t stay for the winter so I’ll have to wait until the Spring to take more pictures.

I saw my first sapsucker.

You can tell that this is a male Yellow-Bellied Sapsucker because he has a red throat.  The females have a white throat.

Do you see the hole that he drilled above?  Sapsuckers are incredibly patient.  They drill the hole and let the sap seep out.  Then they eat some and wait for more to ooze out.  Below is a picture of him drinking sap.

In addition to all the new birds that I saw on this trip, I also saw my first badger.  We saw him from the bus, so we were able to approach much closer.  Unfortunately taking pictures through the glass makes them a bit more blurry, but it’s still a pretty good picture of a badger!

We also saw a moose.  I never get tired of looking at them.

I love seeing the wildlife.