Surprise! It’s a yellow-bellied sapsucker

Few birds were about this morning as I walked the trails at the Mercer Meadows Pole Farm, which made a surprise discovery all the more enjoyable. I’d seen a couple of wedges of Canada geese but little else as I reached the woods half a mile up the trail from the parking lot.

I had a flicker of hope that I might spot an owl tucked into the cedars at the old AT&T Building One site. Park rangers have cordoned that area off with metal barriers, a good sign that either long-eared owls have returned or will do so soon.

I walked around the fenced area and saw nary a bird, let alone an owl. I had not even raised my camera to take a photo, and I turned back toward my car. Just before I reached the edge of the woods, I spotted a bird fly into a tree to my left.

Downy woodpecker was my guess, but then I saw the bird’s long, pointy beak and exultantly decided, hairy woodpecker. The bird was working its way around the tree trunk, affording me fleeting looks at its backside. I moved back and forth to try to get a better look as the bird pecked away. It recoiled just enough for me to get a couple of shots of its head.

As I walked into the clear, I spotted two birds perched high up in a tree.. They were cedar waxwings, and I took a few shots through the branches, not expecting much.

But the sun was shining and lit the bird nicely, as I discovered when I got the frames on screen at home. I uploaded photos of one of the waxwings and the putative hairy woodpecker to e-Bird, and that’s when I got my surprise.

Merlin flagged the “woodpecker” images as wrongly placed — they showed a yellow-bellied sapsucker. Only twice before had I recorded a sapsucker at the Pole Farm.

E-bird’s photo recognition capabilities are new, at least in my experience. I’ve been corrected a couple of times in the last several weeks and delighted with that. I want to get my IDs right. It’s even better when the bird is one I don’t often see. 🦅