G0D’S CREATION: THE SECOND VISITOR

So, as I said at the end of my last posting,  I waited patiently for my regal visitor, the Baltimore Oriole, to return to to his breakfast spot in my bottle brush tree.  However, it was already day four of his continued absence and I was somewhat heavy-hearted for his loss.  It was later in the day, more like mid-morning snack time than breakfast, when I heard a new call.  At first I thought it was him, but then I realized that this call was richer and the notes kind of tripped over each other.

Grabbing the binoculars I headed out into the garden.  I judged the call to be coming from a couple of houses down and began to play the binoculars back and forth in the direction that it seemed to be coming from.  A sudden flash of scarlet caught my attention in a tree that grew in the pine wood out back immediately behind the fence of the third house to our left.

The calls continued and I kept my eyes focused on the tree.  Suddenly I saw him, a very large, jet-black bird with very distinctive white markings around the face and neck, and a few smaller white markings on the shoulder area of his wings.  But what was striking was the brilliant red crest atop his head.  He was at least as big as the American Crow if not bigger, probably eighteen to twenty inches from head to tip of tail. 

His movements were very unique.  He would lightly run up the trunk and, when he came to a halt, would twist his neck round almost 360* as he pecked at what I presumed were insects.  Or else he would hop out onto a branch and would then hang upside down.  Every once in a while he would stop in these activities and let out his rippling call. He was quite something to see and it made me marvel at the variety of creatures that God has created.

I checked him out in my Kenn Kaufman book of birds and discovered that I was seeing the Pileated Woodpecker.  I was thrilled to read that he is an all-season bird for our region and quite surprised that I had not seen him before.  I have spotted the Red-bellied Woodpecker and also the Red-naped Sapsucker in the pine woods out back, and both are about half the size of the Pileated.  Here is the best picture that Rich could grab of him.  He moved around a lot, but this view of his back clearly shows the white markings and his scarlet crest and also shows how he grips onto the trunk.

And so my knowledge of birds for this area is growing.  Now is definitely the season for bird-watching because they are all in a spring-time frenzy of mating and creating nests.  And that fact will lead nicely into my next posting because we have a pair of Carolina Chickadees who have decided to make their home in our back yard.  I get to be a Grandma one way or another!