Pileated Woodpecker

It looked like the perfect sunny day to till the garden but after several days of rain here in Rangeley the soil was just too soupy!  So I decided to do some work potting flowers down by my storage shed and old wood pile.  While I was working I saw what I thought was a crow fly into the trees behind the wood pile.   But then a pileated woodpecker popped up and started foraging for bugs!

This 16" bird is majestic!  Almost pre-historic in appearance.  A noisy beast too.  Always commands one's attention.  I usually stop everything when I hear or see a pileated woodpecker.  And this one was just a few feet away.  So I grabbed my camera, took a few shots and he was gone.

On a walk in the area recently I saw the work of another, or maybe the same, pileated woodpecker.

David Attenborough, in his book The Life of Birds wrote:

"Woodpeckers hunt for insects which are beyond the reach of the tree creeper, beneath the bark and even in the wood below.  The implements they use are not tweezers but chisels.  A blow from a woodpecker's bills strikes a tree at about 25 miles an hour and does so with such force that the two mandibles of its beak would fly apart were they not, at that moment, held together by a special locking device.  The shock of the blow is so great that if it travelled directly to the brain, the bird would be knocked unconscious".

Amazing what happens in our own back yard!