Why I Oughta...

Back in January, I mentioned that we had a big, beautiful Northern Flicker visit our feeders but I was unable to get a useable photo of the bird for the blog.  I posted about it anyway .  Welp, fast-forward a month and guess who's back?!  The Northern Flicker.  And why do I know?  The yellow flight feathers are a tell-tale sign.   Also, the size.  Check out this guy in the photo above and how his body is dominating the suet cage in terms of size.  He's much larger than the other woodpeckers who visit our cages and feeders.  Mark it down, dude.  Northern Flicker.  See the yellow in the photo of him taking off below to confirm:

Just a few days ago, I posted a photo of the Illinois Bird Field Guide that Nat gave me for Christmas and today I can share that is already paying dividends!  We had a visitor to our suet feeder that I was able to get that grainy photo you can see above.  There's a screen up in that window and I didn't want to get too close for fear of scaring him away, so you're going to have to deal with the Zapruder film-version of my woodpecker.   But..that's him up there.  I've posted about woodpeckers before here on the blog last summer when I showed our tailprop suet feeder back in Elmhurst here .  But for the first time, we're able to identify our visitor - which is very exciting!  (at least to me...) I snapped that photo before the bird flew off and then scurried over to my office to open up the field guide to figure out who it was.  As you can see in the photo above, he has a red head, right?  Welp...that would be a big tell!  H...

If you look closely at the photo above, you can see a woodpecker on our new suet feeder in the yard.  It is the wood thing hanging from the post on the right.  If you can't see it, and I don't blame you, here's a cropped version with a helpful pointer of where the woodpecker is below: The girls and I bought this suet feeder - which features something called a 'tail prop' at Menards recently and it is hanging there right next to our finch/thistle seed sock.  The thistle seed sock is our second or third of the summer and brings in a lot of pretty yellow finches to the yard.  But, as the weather is turning cooler, we wanted to try our hand at a suet feeder.  I've tried them before - the metal grid-like ones - with no luck.  Either the suet melted away or no birds ever came or the squirrels got to it.   And after poking around on the web, I think I figured out it was because we didn't have a 'tail prop' suet feeder.  Turns out, woodpecker...