Saturday, December 17, 2011
A lesser spotted woodpecker......
......in the Burnham Beeches area was a lucky find as I only had about an hour for a walk. I caught sight of him from the path, and when he didn't fly off I walked a little way into the trees. He was still quite distant, so the photos are severely cropped.
Even when the woodpecker was relatively motionless for a few seconds, his head generally wasn't!
He was foraging fairly low down. The growth further up the branch is probably Yellow Brain Fungus.
When I looked at this photo I thought the bird was using a stick to poke food out of a hole, like the Woodpecker Finch of the Galapagos Islands. Then I realised it probably was the food, in the shape of a white larva.
Elsewhere, a great spotted woodpecker looked strange as it foraged on the ground among dead leaves and beech-mast until I realised what it was (in fact, I saw all three woodpeckers today), and a meadow pipit on the Abbey Park Farm fields was a woods tick for me.
// posted by Christine @ 7:22 AM 
