Birds of Different Feathers: Piliated Woodpecker

A friend has been telling me for months that she had one or more Piliated woodpeckers visiting an apple tree beside the alley at the rear of her house. I had been somewhat reluctant to photograph there because the alley was fairly narrow, a dead-end and the houses rather close together and close to the alley. When the forecast rain didn't arrive on Tuesday and Wednesday dawned with partly cloudy skies I decided to try for the woodpecker.

The first thing I discovered when I walked up the alley was that she hadn't warned me about her two guard dogs... about ankle high but very loud and very active. They were behind a fence and I managed to put a hedgerow between us and they finally quieted. I sat for just about exactly an hour (with a nature photographer's patience) and watched American robins, European starlings, Dark-eyed juncos, a male House finch and a Northern flicker visit the apple tree. I watched as the flicker dropped two apples to the ground. There might have been other species, but I was facing the sun and the apple tree was horribly backlit.

After sitting in the middle of the alley for about an hour a buck finally strolled across the alley not ten feet from me and started eating the apples the flicker had just caused to fall. It wasn't long after that I heard a nagging call. I turned and saw a Piliated woodpecker fly from the forest behind me, over my head, past the apple tree and land on the top of a power pole, obviously eying the situation. It didn't take long for it to fly back to the apple tree and land in the middle where I had no hope for a photograph, but it gradually made its way over to my side of the tree... where most of the apples seemed to be.

The lighting was still terrible (I would have been shooting almost directly into the sun) but since I was so close to the apple tree I could move just a few feet down the alley and get much better lighting, and the woodpecker seemed oblivious to my presence. And while I was maneuvering for a good angle on the first woodpecker (a male) a second Piliated woodpecker flew in, but it stayed on the far side of the apple tree and I never got a good look at it. I might presume that the second woodpecker was a female.

So I obtained a lot of Piliated woodpecker photos, a few deer photos, and later on the far (eastern) side of March's Point I got a few photos of a Bald eagle, possibly the same one I had photographed last week but there was at least one more in the area and possibly yet another.