A hairy woodpecker pays a rare call

Sometimes it takes a while for the bird recognition neurons in my brain to kick in. That happened this morning as I was looking out the windows toward our backyard feeders.

I’d watched a female downy woodpecker fly onto the suet feeder and munch a while before flitting off. A few minutes later, another woodpecker arrived, this one with the red cap at the back of its head. Ah, that must be the male, I reckoned.

I watched the bird peck away for a minute or so when it dawned on me that the bird was about as tall as the suet cake, much larger than the female that preceded it. Then I took a hard look at the bird’s bill. It wasn’t the stubby bill of a downy but longer and proportionally larger relative to the bird’s head.

Then the neuron fired — hairy woodpecker!

I popped over to my camera and blasted off several shots of Mr. Hairy. To help others and to reinforce the identifying cues in my brain, I’m posting below a shot I took last January of a downy woodpecker on the suet feeder. Note how it’s not as tall as the suet cake or the cage. In contrast, the head of the hairy woodpecker in the photo atop this post is even with the top of the cage, and its tail extends below the cage.

Here’s another shot of the hairy woodpecker for comparison purposes. 🦅