The Ministry of Minor Avians, Part 2 |  |
Next up, a fellow bested only by the roadrunner in bearing no resemblance to his cartoon version:
This is a male downy woodpecker. You can tell he's a male by the red patch on the back of his head and by the huge boner he gets when he starts ripping into the suet.
We get a male and female, presumably a mated pair, daily. They don't seem to like feeding at the same time, a preservation instinct I both understand and can totally dig. It would be easy to mistake this fellow for a hairy woodpecker (seriously, Picoides villosus) just by the plumage, but the hairies I understand are both larger and don’t range quite as far north as I and my suet. Also concerning plumage, this photo understates how striking the black and white ladder pattern down the back is.
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