Spying on a Woodpecker Pair

David R. Brooks, Ph.D.

Frequent "Gallery" contributors David R. Brooks and Susan Caughlan have scored again with a set of nice photographs of a pair of woodpeckers. David has allowed us to provide the following account taken from his web site and e-mails. Editor.

Figure 1 shows a male red-bellied woodpecker (Melanerpes carolinus) photographed on 7 March 2008. "Red-bellied" refers to the faint reddish coloration on this bird's underside, which you can't see in this photo. The female shown in Fig. 2 has a smaller amount of red, restricted to the nape of its neck and a small tuft of red just above its bill.

Figure 1. Male red-bellied woodpecker. Photograph by David R. Brooks.

These birds love suet, which is what these are eating. They are a nesting pair, as we have often seen them together this spring.

Figure 2. Female red-bellied woodpecker. Photograph by Susan Caughlan.

Both photographs were made from about 5 meters away with our Panasonic DMC-FZ20. I take the suet feeder down at night, because it attracts four-legged varmints, who try to get into Susan's garden to get at it. Once inside the garden they wreak other havoc, of course. Around the time of year we were taking these photos, when I hung the feeder out in the morning, the red-bellied woodpeckers would come literally in one or two minutes -- by the time I got inside and back upstairs.

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