Red-heads II

Earlier this year there was a post on In Forest and Field describing how I found red-headed woodpeckers not too far from home. I’ve returned to the site several times in the intervening months and, although I’ve seen the birds, have never been able to get any photos of them that are worth posting or even keeping.

Back I went in late-June and walked through the stand of large trees where the woodpeckers had been in the spring. No sign of them.

So I headed out of the woods and back toward where the car was parked. Across the road there’s a patch of young forest and a recently mowed area of grass with a few scattered trees – and suddenly there was that bright white flash of a red-headed woodpecker’s wings –

Red-headed woodpeckers are well known for feeding like flycatchers, catching flying insects in open areas. And here it was doing just that.

The bird sometimes launched from a large walnut, sometimes from a smaller tree some distance away on the edge of the woods –

It almost always went back to one of those two trees, but frequently not the one from which it took off. Usually it had insects held in its beak, apparently to feed young ones –

Suddenly there were two red-headed woodpeckers on the small tree, a breeding pair! –

They each sallied forth to catch insects –

They caught more insects, with some earlier catches still held in their beaks. After getting a beakful each bird would fly off toward the stand of large trees – where they must have had a nest with young.

I tried to follow them to their nest, but each time lost sight of them as they flew above the dense canopy of leaves far faster than I can walk. Looking through the stand of large trees in hopes of finding the nest tree may well have taken many hours with no assurance of success.

At the end of January, when I’d first found the birds, there was a juvenile as well as one or more adults. It’s good to see evidence that they’re nesting in the area once again.