Pileated Woodpecker on the Pigeon River

Pileated Woodpecker (Karen Cooper)

Here is a photo I took this morning of a beautiful Pileated Woodpecker on a large old cedar tree in my backyard. It was just browsing around the trunk, yanking off bark and insect hunting. It wasn’t excavating holes in the tree. I’ve been told by my neighbour that when it starts doing that you can hear it a long way off! What really surprised me about it – and it probably shouldn’t have 🙂 – was that it hops about the tree with the same motions as its smaller relatives do – very efficiently!