This morning I heard a lot of noise in the woods, and I noticed that there was a courtin' goin' on. The male Flicker came up and landed on the big birdhouse at the entrance of our driveway, and started to beat the drum. That guy can really rap out a rhythm, and he makes it loud. He followed this other Flicker into a Doug Fir tree and they started to dance. I am not sure if this is his girl, or his adversary. It appears to me to be another male, but I didn't get the chance to check between their legs or whatever one does when feather brilliance doesn't make it obvious. Come to think of it, I can't remember ever seeing a Flicker that wasn't as colorful as these two. Perhaps both sexes share similar feather fashion.
3 comments:
It could have been an 'I dare you' dance. They do both look like males. They are so pretty.
Hey Bill, do flickers and sapsuckers look alike? We have some dudes that look like these guys in our neck of the woods. They sure are pretty but they can be annoying when your trying to do some hard physics and they start 'playing the drums' on the rain gutters. Silly me I thought they would hammer away on trees. I guess in Colorado aluminum gutters sound better. Anyway, I thought they were called sapsuckers. Is there any way to tell which are the suckers and which are the flickers?
Sounds like the same birds to me, they do tend to get noisy, and used to drive Phillip nuts at the farm house. They are a woodpecker, and the rapping on a tree or bird house or the feeders reverberates through the woods out here and is believed to be what they do to call in females during mating season. There is another school of thought that says it is a thing they do to get bugs moving around so they can determine if the have a food source to go digging for. I saw on the news once that they were having a big problem with them in Florida picking holes in the foam outer layer on the space shuttle solid rocket booster, but that was a long time ago so I assume that they got that problem worked out,,,BANG, BANG!
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