Red-headed Woodpecker

Around the corner from my house, Burlington, ON. May 19 2020.  I was unable to go very far from home today which was unavoidable and caused me some hand-wringing for a while. It was, by all accounts, a very good day to be out in the field but, that’s the way it goes some days. However, around midday a near neighbour called and breathlessly shared that he was watching a Red-headed Woodpecker in his back yard. “I’ll be right over.” I said, dropping everything to grab binoculars, camera and a spare battery.  As I hastened to his house I congratulated myself on my forethought in scooping up the battery, imagining how I’d feel if the camera were to blandly say ‘Battery Exhausted’ just when I had a prize bird at hand.

It all worked perfectly. On arrival, Richard called me through to his back yard and there was the woodpecker waiting for me. It was obliging as I took a number of photos.

Red-headed Woodpeckers are becoming few and far between in Ontario, very much a sighting to share with pride and a little smugness. The species’ population has fluctuated over the past century or two, going from great abundance to scarcity approaching extinction. Among factors over the years are variations in the crops of beech mast and acorns, the demise of American Chestnut and Elm and perhaps the disappearance of formerly abundant grasshoppers in the mid-west. In Ontario it is classified as ‘Threatened’.

Its striking plumage (males and females are identical) has earned it some colourful common names such as white-shirt, half-a-shirt, shirt-tail bird, tri-coloured woodpecker, jellycoat, flag bird and the flying checkerboard. (ref. Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Birds of the World).  Woodpeckers seem to attract fanciful folk names, perhaps because of their size and conspicuousness, I’m thinking of the UK’s Green Woodpecker, aka Yaffle, an onomatopoeic name; and the now extinct Ivory-billed Woodpecker sometimes called the Lord-God Bird on account of the woodsman’s reaction to its size.

For me today it was quite simply My Bird of the Day.