It was John Janovy, I think, who said that any cartoon about a real  woodpecker would have to be x-rated. I suspect that he was alluding to the “reverse mounting” for which picids are notorious, but it’s not just sex, there’s  plenty of violence in a woodpecker’s life, too.

Just watch Hairies and Downies squabbling at a feeder, or Red-headeds mixing it up with European Starlings in the bottomland forests of the Midwest.

Yesterday morning at Kokanee Creek, I heard a Pileated Woodpecker drumming. It didn’t take long to find it, high in a snag above the parking lot at the dog beach–or to see that I wasn’t the only one interested in the big picid.

As I watched, four Red-shafted Flickers flew in, landed above and around the Pileated and began their squeaka-weecking, tails spread wide. I’d never seen such a vigorous interaction between the two species, and could only attribute it to the flickers’ own interest in the snag as a potential nest site. I’ll be keeping an eye out over the next couple of weeks to see what develops. And who knows, maybe making a little money selling woodpecker videos on the web.

Step One: Go to where there are American Dippers.

Step Two: Find some dippery doo.

Step Three: Sit. Stay.

Step Four: Watch dipper.

Three hundred or more Bohemian Waxwings were just up the road from David’s house here in Nelson this morning, their pleasant buzzing trills drowning out everything but the Steller’s Jays and a nearby Pileated Woodpecker. Though the flock “staged” in the tops of surrounding trees, it was the mountain ash fruits they were after, of course, a food source they enjoyed acrobatically

and sometimes a little bit belligerently.

The dog was eager to get home after our walk along the snowy BNSF trail here in Nelson, but even the couple of minutes he let me watch made it obvious that there were both first-cycle and adult birds in the flock, distinguished–as any modern field guide points out–by the complexity of the wing markings. The bird above is young, while this one is a glorious adult:

I was so enchanted by the chatterers that I nearly overlooked the fourteen Evening Grosbeaks stripping cottonwood buds close by.

With Pine Siskins, American Goldfinches, and Red Crossbills all making appearances along our route, it turned out to be a classic wintry morning–with the bonus of blue skies and warm temperatures. Keep it up, Nelson!

One of the four Tundra Swans hanging out at Kelowna–the drowsy bird on the left–was wearing a neck collar.

I sent the number, P944, to Patuxent, but it turns out that the bird has been under surveillance since November, when it arrived on the Kelowna waterfront. Russ told me today that the bird was banded as an adult female on July 29 of last year at the evocatively named King Salmon, Alaska–a site on Bristol Bay so remote that not even my good friend googlemaps can calculate the distance this bird has traveled.