Lovejoy News: Getting Acquainted with the Northern Flicker

As a kid I thought of Flickers as the other woodpecker, I loved its pots and stripes as much as the red crest of old Pileated. It was a special treat when we saw one in the yard, pecking at the maple so I thought they were rare. As an adult living in Portland I knew Flickers as the flashy bird couple that frequented the parking lots around my building  but I never saw them pecking on trees and forgot they were woodpeckers

One day I saw an orange Flicker in the arboretum and was so curious
I had to look it up in Cornell’s Ornithology Lab on-line.

There I learned that Flickers prefer to hunt for bugs on the ground and are really very common. My two notions of the Flicker finally fused into one coherent reality and the orange Flicker must have been a female basking in the sun.