pictures of Dryocopus Pileatus

[chrisinhouston]

I was sitting at the kitchen table over the weekend when I heard this loud tapping outside, so I went out to investigate. Up in my neighbors tree about 40 ft away I saw a large Pileated Woodpecker. This is the largest member of this family of birds and you don't see too many these days due to dwindling hapitat. They mostly feed on bugs in rotted tree limbs and I guess with an ever growing and expanding human population and a compulsion to prune dead wood from our trees they are mostly deep in forests now. Thier cousin, the Ivory Billed Woodpecker is the one thought to be extinct that made headlines a few years ago in Arkansas when someone thought they saw one.

Anyway, I ran inside and grabbed my camera with a 70-200 lens and my Bushhawk support and got off a few images before he moved on. I am posting 3 because they show that in about 10 minutes he went from picking at a rotten spot on an oak limb to all out carving it out. Keep in mind that this bird stands about 10 inches tall, like a big crow and by the time he quit on that tree the whole is about as big as he is. When he started hitting hard wood the sound was really loud!

I wonder if my grandchildren will be able to see things like this someday or if they will be gone. When I was a kid growing up in Georgia we saw them much more.