Urban Pileated Woodpecker!

We live in the city of Lansing a couple miles. We do have patches of woods nearby and our back yard is fairly large by urban standards (about 1/2 an acre), but Pileated woodpeckers are very large birds that seem to prefer more wooded, less urban areas.

So, we haven’t seen Pileated woodpeckers hardly ever in our yard. Imagine my surprise when I was in our not-large front yard and Angie asked me, “what bird is that?” I was thinking the same thing. I looked up, and there, big and vigorous is a male (probably) Pileated woodpecker in our maple tree, calling their funny call, and sending wood chips flying!

While it was only about 20 feet up and 30 feet away from our front porch, it was a very bad glare day with overcast. No way I could get a picture that showed the bird, with my phone. For those of you who don’t see them ever, or rarely, I included a picture of a big female (I think) chopping out a big cavity from a tree on the shore of Lake Ovid that I watched a few weeks ago!

They can really excavate some serious wood when they want to. We have a big stump of a dead tree in the neighbor’s back yard where we’ve see a really big Pileated woodpecker adding more holes a couple times. This makes our first front yard sighting, though we’ve seen and heard them in the back of our neighbor’s yard across the street a few times.

I almost think there may be a partial nest hole in the top of one dead branch of our maple tree in the front yard!? I’m pretty sure after the front yard woodpecker disappeared, I saw red head feathers inside the hole?!? This could get interesting!