New year's eve gift

December 31, 2018  •  Leave a Comment

I had thought about getting up early and driving down to Napatree for the first beach walk in a couple of months, but I opted for virtue, which is to say, I really needed to get all the wood I cut yesterday under shelter since there was significant rain in the forecast later on and I wanted to keep the latest haul dry and ready for the stove. I expected that my opting for doing the right thing would be communing with the titmice and chickadees, but when I exited the basement, I noticed something eye-catching on a large oak by the diminished wood pile: two large and dark woodpeckers that were chasing each other around the tree trunk. They were a bit bigger than Hairies, but they were too dark for that species. I had neither camera nor binoculars with me, so, intrigued, I headed back inside, put the 100-400mm Sigma on the dSLR, and hid behind a tree near the shed, the lens fixed on the suet feeder, where I'd see what I thought was the same pair of birds. Virtue rewarded: one of the couple landed quite close and remained still for a few seconds and several decent enough shots. Definitely Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers, one of the sillier names for a truly stunning species.


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