Our bird of the week is the downy woodpecker. They are so cute! They frequent my suet feeder, as the photos below attest. I seem to have caught images of just the female downy, which is too bad, because it doesn’t provide a comparison to the male (who, as is typical of the bird world, is a bit more colorful). The male has a red spot on the nape of his head, which this gal lacks.
Be that as it shouldn’t be, here’s a female downy, on two different days in May, enjoying herself some suet:
Front view, enjoying a nice big brick of suet.
You’ll notice in the photo below, about three-quarters of the suet is gone. No, she didn’t eat all of that. The squirrels eat most of the suet (it has seeds in it, too), which is fine with me, because so far it has kept them from feeling the need to jump into the window feeder and devour all the sunflower seed.
The downys seem less flighty and nervous than most other woodpeckers, so I am usually able to get some decent pictures.
-Sharon, the muse of Gadget (who cares about birds?), and Barnum, SDiT (I still enjoy The Bird Channel)
Beautiful! Those woodpeckers are my favs. I watched a female hairy woodpecker check out our birdhouses this morning, before the rain really hit!