A Couple Of Woodpeckers

It's been a little too long again since my last post. I've been stuck in the house until I start to feel a bit better so I don't have much to post about. I didn't intend to take so long, but it gets hard when I'm cooped up and not really able to get excited about seeing nature in action.

I still have some things I've seen though, like these two woodpeckers, even though these pictures are actually from several months ago. At first glance they may look like two of the same kind of bird, but look again. The one on the right is much bigger than the bird on the left.

The little bird on the left is the same kind of Downy Woodpecker that I've posted before several times. The bigger bird on the right is her relative, a male Hairy Woodpecker.

The similarities between these birds are very interesting. They both look almost the same except for their size. Both male versions have that red band on the back of their head. The females don't have that. The downy here is a female and the hairy is a male.

There are differences though. As I've said, the hairy woodpecker is much bigger than the downy. The most noticeable difference after that is the length of the beaks. The downy woodpecker has a much shorter beak in relation to its head.

The bigger hairy woodpecker's beak is about the same length as its head, while the downy woodpecker's beak is very short in comparison. That's the best way to tell which one you are seeing when they are not together like in my pictures.

The strange distortions in my pictures is actually dog slobber on the window I took the pictures through. The dog gets kind of excited watching the birds. I have to constantly clean the window.

Maybe you don't consider this last picture that good, but I love it. It shows the downy woodpecker flying away. I love capturing stuff like that, no matter how it comes out.

I actually began writing this post about a week ago. I had to stop because I just wasn't feeling very good. I think I'm finally beginning to get better now, so I'm going to make an effort to start writing my posts a little sooner again.

There's a small nature park up the road that I'm going to visit quite a bit to get back into going out again. I'm hoping that if I visit it often enough that I'll begin to see some interesting stuff that I otherwise would miss. That's how I did things years ago and it worked out very well. I hope my next post is from that place. I'll talk to you later.