Pontius Pileated and other woodland wonders

Finally some sun! The girls and I took advantage of it with a walk in the woods this morning. First we had to reach an agreement on where to go, and one daughter was not especially happy about the final vote. “We never see anything there,” she grumbled. “I’d rather go to the marsh and maybe we’d have a chance of seeing the pileated.”

“Maybe we can go there on the way home, if we feel like it,” I said.

Guess what was just about the first thing we saw?

Pontius Pileated himself! But wait — there’s still more! (Anyone remember the Ginsu commercials from years ago?)  This is the male — you can tell from the red sideburns. After studying us with that yellow eye, he flew off to a nearby tree and introduced us to his wife.

She wasn’t in quite such a mood for posing nicely, but it was a thrill just the same. And you know what it means. Where there is a Mr. and a Mrs., there will be youngsters. Somewhere, poking out of a big hole in a tree, will be little pileated beaks and little pileated squalls of laughter. So there’s our next woodland detective mission!

I’ve wanted a good pileated photo for so long that my day was made. But the woods had plenty more to reveal.

I saw an orange butterfly, and a black one, fluttering around the trees. There were woodpeckers of several varieties — a red-belly, a pair of downies making a racket, and a couple of hairies. While the girls played upstream, I sat on a rock and waited for a chipmunk to come back out from under its log, and got that feeling of being watched. As often happens in the woods, I discovered that while I was observing nature, it was observing me.

Mrs. Robin kept a wary eye on me all the while she bathed — so wary, I never did get a photo of her dunking her head. But she created a shower curtain of water droplets and seemed to enjoy all the splashing and fluttering.

I turned at a movement across the stream and got to watch a brown creeper spiralling its way up a tree. How about a game of Find That Bird? Can you see it in this photo?

Pretty cool, huh?

My poor camera can’t tell bark from bird.

We made a last stop at a favorite spot…

…and headed home for lunch.

A tree sparrow bid us goodbye.