Bright and early this morning I happened to look out the bedroom window. Not far away, a Pileated Woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus), worked away at a fallen tree rotting on the ground.

This woodpecker is quite large, the size of a crow. It’s one that I see quite often flying from one tree to another, or flying in front of me as I go down my mountain road. Unmistakeable because of its size and coloring.

The Pileated Woodpecker’s favorite meal is Carpenter Ants, but they also eat many other sorts of insects, other arthropods, and nuts and wild fruits. They will on occasion dine at a feeder, eating seeds or suet but here at my feeders it doesn’t happen often.

As for the photos I tried to get, let’s just say I managed to record the event and nothing more. The image immediately above is one of my attempts. The woodpecker was working in a bunch of briars and brambles. And to complicate things further, I was shooting through a window screen. The image at the top was taken in February of this year, apparently when the photography gods were smiling upon me. 🙂

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