Pileated Bliss Part II

You can imagine my utter shock and delight when I saw not one, but two pileateds off our back deck early Sunday morning (there are some advantages to waking up at 6 am after three hours sleep, and this was definitely one of them-- got my mind off of everything swirling confusedly through it that early morn instantly). I didn't discover them. Eagle Eyes was sitting outside reading her book when she heard their loud noises and came and got me.

As I've written before, I thought I had been hearing a pileated woodpecker calling around our house on and off all summer, but sometimes wondered if I imagined it and it was actually a yellow-shafted flicker because our neighborhood is very residential and not what I think of as typical pileated habitat (the calls of the pileated and flicker are very similar). My boss had confirmed that it was a pileated calling, but still it somehow seemed like it might be a figment of my imagination. So after feeling like these birds had been teasing me all summer with their calls but not one glimpse of themselves, I was beyond ecstatic to see them in my backyard.

The best part is that when I crept within about ten feet on the back deck they completely ignored me so I was able to watch their behavior from up close. I expected them to be skittish, so I tried to use the back deck as a blind, but they were not in the least fearful of me even when I stopped trying to hide. They stuck around for about half an hour, so that was a whole lot of up close, uninterrupted, blissful pileated observation. Their behavior was fascinating, and I still don't know what it means. The one on the right in most of the photos, and by itself in the fourth and fifth photos below is an adult male, identifiable by its red mustache below the eye, close to its beak. The other bird is either its offspring, a hatch year, that was begging unsuccessfully for food, or its mate, an adult female. (Neither makes entire sense to me as why would the hatch year hang around if it wasn't getting fed and why would the male and female still be courting when they have, to the best of my knowledge, already raised their young this year-- some kind of post breeding courtship???) Either way the non-male bird followed the male around the tree as they circled up and down, pecking gently at the trunk occasionally. The non-male would frequently throw its head back and make a low, clucking-like vocalization entirely unlike the ascending call that the adult pileateds usually make. It was completely fascinating and I watched mesmerized and taking photographs the entire time they were within my view. Enjoy.