Pileated, home

The day dawned and remained pretty dreary throughout, and, with iffy weather tomorrow—the day I was scheduled to be teaching sixth-graders about the environment on a series of planned outdoor walks—I had to pull together an indoor presentation option... just in case the rains really did wash out our hikes. I finished in the later part of the afternoon, and with the precipitation holding off, I went outside for a quick trip into the woods. I was hoping that I might hear one of those mystery warblers, the ones that sounded suspiciously like the waterthrushes we get in the wetlands behind the house early in the migration season. The songbirds, however, were quiet... but the slow hammering I noticed was fairly close, and, with the Sigma supertelephoto on the camera, I thought I might get lucky and "capture" what had to be a nearby Pileated Woodpecker. Sure enough, I spooked the excavator, but instead of retreating in a black-and-white rush into the gloom, the great bird landed on a nearby tree and resumed its eternal hunt for Carpenter Ants. I steadied the equally great lens and fired away, harvesting a punk portrait of a Pileated at work.