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Oh, wait, never mind. Darned local news stations… Hat-tip to Birdchick.

This week I find myself writing about Colombia again. But this should not come as a surprise as the country really is almost fathomless when it comes to delicious bird content. This post relates to a delightful Colombian endemic called the Grayish Piculet. Woodpeckers are phenomenally well-represented in Colombia and the country holds anything from [...]

Disbelief probably seems like the proper response to the idea that there are woodpeckers in New York City.  After all, woodpeckers peck on trees, not skyscrapers. But Gotham’s many parks have some very suitable habitat for birds from the family Picidae and a birder in any borough of New York will generally find at least [...]

As regular readers of 10,000 Birds already know, I am enamored of my Queens list. So when a Red-headed Woodpecker was reported on Thursday at St. John’s Cemetery by Daryl Cavallaro (who shared this picture with us awhile back) I was there first thing Friday morning. I searched for about an hour unsuccessfully before I [...]

Why would I call these beautiful woodpeckers the “clowns of the avian world?” Besides the facial features of the Acorn Woodpecker (Melanerpes formicivorus) appearing somewhat clown-like, they are a joy to watch and some of their antics are sure to bring a smile to anyone’s face. Both the male and female of the species have [...]

It’s been an indoorsy kind of week here in Montana, so I’m sharing a bit of the past with you guys: an excerpt from The Winter Texans, my essay in the current issue of Camas. While Dennis labors over the corned beef, and the potatoes and cabbage and carrots, Ellie and Chuk and I visit [...]

You may remember the awesome encounter Doug and I had with Red-cockaded Woodpeckers at the Three Lakes Wildlife Management Area from this post. If you are some kind of idiot savant you might even remember that the last image of a Red-cockaded Woodpecker that I shared was of the bird holding a grub in its bill. [...]

The Red-breasted Sapsucker (Sphyrapicus ruber) and the Red-naped Sapsucker (Sphyrapicus nuchalis) were considered different forms of the Yellow-bellied Sapsucker (Sphyrapicus varius) until 1983 when they were split into separate species. They are called sapsuckers because they create sap wells in the bark of woody plants and feed on that sap. The bird shown above arrived [...]

Lewis’s Woodpecker (Melanerpes lewis) In Flight, photos by Larry Jordan Driving home from work last week I finally saw my first Lewis’s Woodpecker (Melanerpes lewis) of the fall.  Lucky for me, these beautiful and unusual woodpeckers can be found nearly year round in the oak savannah along the road I travel daily.  I consider myself extremely blessed as [...]

Alex Washoe is a freelance writer and bookseller in Seattle, WA.  who can be found regularly at the bird and wildlife blog Birdland West. However, he’s been known to share his perspicacious avian observations around the web, including right here! Last time, Alex asked us to Consider the Chickadee. Today, he talks about a crazy woodpecker… A [...]

Picus viridis, the European Green Woodpecker is a bird that I longed to see during my early days as a feeder watcher. They never visited my little sack of nuts however and I had to venture beyond my bedroom window to find one. Green Woodpeckers prefer to eat ants and will more usually be found feeding [...]

Short answer: The woodpecker is most likely not crazy and noshing on the house is not what the woodpecker has in mind.  Woodpeckers could be pecking on homes for a variety of reasons, all of which can drive a non birder a bit batty. Talk about pesky, a Northern Flicker like the bird above liked [...]

On a recent trip down memory lane in the form of searching through old photos from my trip to Honduras I serendipitously stumbled upon a series of shots of a woodpecker feeding from flower blossoms in a tree.  I was relatively certain that the bird was a Golden-fronted Woodpecker Melanerpes aurifrons but, time and memory [...]

The typical woodpecker, with its coloration of black, white, and red, is ingrained into our brains as birders.  We all have our familiar species and we all know our local woodpeckers well enough that a quick glimpse is often all we need to identify them.  Because many of our common woodpeckers are such a regular [...]

Way back on 30 October of last year a Lewis’s Woodpecker was seen coming to a backyard bird feeder in Ontario County, New York, and was quickly identified.  Why is that awesome?  Well, first of all, Lewis’s Woodpecker is one of the most amazing woodpeckers in North America, with a color scheme of pink, red, [...]

In the southeast United States, the woodpecker that gets all the attention is the one with the red cockade.  Rightly so I guess, it is, after all, a federally endangered species and limited to a few fragments of pine barrens habitat across the south, but we in Dixie have remarkable numbers of other woodpeckers too [...]

The Nuttall’s Woodpecker (Picoides nuttallii) is found primarily in the oak woodlands of California and northern Baja California. It just so happens that I also live in the oak woodlands of California and was able to see these little woodpeckers feeding their young at their tree cavity nest last year. This year, they are coming [...]

The concept of endemism, as it pertains to ecologists (and birders are nothing if not amateur ecologists), is tossed around somewhat carelessly.  Seemingly simply put, it’s a reference to a species found in some sort of defined zone be that as well defined as an island in the ocean or as nebulous as a patch [...]

With Brown-headed Nuthatch ticked off my life list I was excited to get out and about and see my life Red-cockaded Woodpecker.  Nate arrived at my aunt and uncle’s house just a couple of minutes after my sighting and we were off to Southern Pines, North Carolina, home of the Weymouth Woods-Sandhills Nature Preserve, the [...]

Several times over the last couple of years I have had non-birder acquaintances ask me about the “bird with polka dots,” “a bird on my lawn with polka dots,” or “the polka dot bird.”  In Golden Wings, an anthology of birding tales by Pete Dunne, one of his stories is called “A Flicker Day for [...]