Female hairy woodpecker (Picoides villosus) picking insects from the moss growing on a big-leaf mapl
Female hairy woodpecker (Picoides villosus) picking insects from the moss growing on a big-leaf maple. You can tell it’s a female because males have a patch of red towards the back of their head. Hairy woodpeckers live in mature woodlands and typically share habitat with downy woodpeckers, which look almost exactly the same. They’re different in that the length of the hairy woodpecker’s beak is almost the same as the length of it’s head. The downy has a very small beak in proportion to it’s head length and also has roughly a third of the body size as the hairy. Both species nest in tree cavities and usually excavate their nests in tree snags with polypore mushrooms growing on them. The polypores soften up the wood so both species can excavate cavities. Only the pileated woodpecker is powerful enough to excavate deep nesting cavities without the help of a fungus -- source link
#hairy woodpecker#ravensroots#naturalist school#birding