Tag: Northern flicker
-
Woodpecker Week
It was Woodpecker Week these last few days! The Front Range has three different common types of woodpecker, and at least one of each kind came tapping around our neighborhood. First up: The bird every homeowner loves to hate — Northern Flickers. This male demonstrates why. This is the red-shafted variety of Northern Flicker. Both…
-
Angry Cooper’s Hawk
My husband and I were working in the yard yesterday and heard what we thought was Northern flicker calling as it flew overhead. Reflexively glancing up to see the bird, I was startled to see not a flicker, but a hawk or very large falcon slicing through the sky, crying as it did so. Whipping…
-
Update on the Northern Flicker Nest …
Several weeks ago, I posted some of my favorite nature photographs in honor Nature Photography Week https://amylawscigeek.com/2024/06/10/nature-photography-week-day-2/, including one of a Red-shafted Northern Flicker poking it’s head out of a hole in an crabapple tree. In that post, I said that the tree was often considered for a nest by Flickers, but never used, because…
-
Nature Photography Week Day 2
Pasque flower seen on the trail early one spring. I love how the fuzzy hairs make it seem to glow! This female Northern Flicker is checking out a hole excavated in a crab apple tree. Every spring flickers covet this hole. And every spring they eventually nest someplace else — this site is about four…
-
Doin’ the Wicka Dance
I haven’t posted very many photos of Northern Flickers because, mostly, I think they are boring (except when they are being chased). Big, beautiful, but not much going on in their woodpecker brains. But late last month, my husband called me to the window overlooking our multiple bird feeding stations. Outside were two male flickers…
-
A Flicker and Two Hawks
My husband and I walk the dogs every morning, three quarters of a mile up the hill, then loop around and come back. It’s kept the covid pounds off, mostly. It also provides the occasional benefit of letting us seeing some wildlife. As we started up the hill earlier this week, I saw a funny…
-
Spring is Coming — Promise
It has been a long cold hard winter along the Front Range of Colorado. We have gotten enough snow in February to wipe out the incipient drought we were headed into, which is a good thing. But it came at the cost of a snowstorm every couple of days. That was hard. We’re not out…
-
Spring Knocking at the Door
They may be having bomb cyclones in the East.winter storm riley. They may be getting feet of snow in the West. Winter Storm Quinn Pounding the West But in the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, for better or for worse, Spring is knocking at the door. How do I know that Spring is on…
-
Sharp-shinned hawk misses flicker for lunch
The gregarious band of little bushtits took off in a burst of feathers and cheeping alarm calls. I looked up just in time to see a Northern flicker shoot out of the top of a tree, with a sharp-shinned hawk in hot pursuit. Luckily for the flicker, the hawk had made its move too soon,…
Amy Law, Science Geek 