Pileated Woodpecker

Friday January 13 2017. RBG Arboretum, Hamilton ON. In need of a good winter leg-stretch and an opportunity to blow the cobwebs away I took the longest and hilly-est route I could find around a wide expanse of woodland. The weather was cooperating, sunny at times but cold enough to be crunchy underfoot, and the day turned out to be quite productive bird-wise. I don’t think I saw another human soul for most of the five kilometers of trails I covered.

I was surprised and delighted by this Winter Wren who popped out of the fringes of a cattail marsh and was curious to see what the fuss was all about. The fuss, such as it was, came from a bunch of Black-capped Chickadees who seemed to expect that I had brought food for them, but I hadn’t and the chickadees were indignantly persistent. The chickadees also attracted the attention of a couple of American Tree Sparrows and a White-throated Sparrow. The rather unexpected Winter Wren was a treat and I had mentally tagged it as my Bird of the Day until just a little further up a trail I found myself almost face to face with this male Pileated Woodpecker. Step aside Winter Wren!

There are many things to celebrate about Pileateds . They’re big, showy and gloriously awesome (awesome in the literal, pre generation-x, sense of the word). They’re more often heard than seen; you’ll often catch a Pileated’s ringing call from perhaps half a kilometer away. Sometimes it’s not only their vocalization but their hammering that you pick up, in search of succulent grubs they bash away at soft old trees, loudly like the chiseling of a medieval shipbuilder; there’s nothing else quite like it. When you see Pileateds it’s often a fleeting, distant and sometimes shy glimpse; but today I was lucky.

This male (male’s have a red moustachial stripe, females black) seemed generally unconcerned about my presence. He didn’t want me too close but 20 feet away seemed to be okay. He was deeply engrossed excavating for food, but even so, as is so typical of Pileateds, he opted to maintain a practical and physical separation by prefering to stay on the opposite side of the tree from me. I stood watching and waiting for perhaps fifteen minutes, knowing he was there and just catching the odd photo when he’d venture around, but more often than not it was just a flash of his red head to one side or the other.

It rarely easy in my experience to get a good photo of a Pileated, and today, although I took the better part of eighty shots, his evasiveness, the foreground clutter and sharply contrasting light made it tricky. Still I did quite well and on one of my shots you can just make out his long, probing tongue. Here is a gallery of shots visible only on the website, not if you’re reading this as an email. Click on any photo to see it enlarged.

It was one of those birding experiences with everything working in my favour: I had the place to myself and there was no urgency on my part or the Pileated’s, a Red-bellied Woodpecker was just behind it (a nice counterpoint) and a White-breasted Nuthatch behind that (ditto).

Funny how, in the depths of winter, woodlands and their fringes can be very quiet one day, and then at other times, like today, quite rewarding, it makes you wonder where the birds go to on the quiet days. By the time I completed my walk I had added a Carolina Wren, three Hairy Woodpeckers, a Northern Mockingbird, Northern Cardinals and a couple of soaring Red-tailed Hawks to my day.