Pileated Woodpeckers (Learning about birds . . .)

We have been lucky to have a pair of Pileated Woodpeckers visit our feeder on a regular basis over the last few years. The last few days they have been visiting quite a bit. I thought posting photos to show the difference between the male and female to help with identification might be interesting. Look at the head and chin of the two birds and you'll see the red forehead on the male and black forehead on the female. The male also has red on side of his chin (malar area) where the female has black.

Adult male: Red forehead - Red malar area


Adult female: Black forehead - Black malar stripe


Malar: Area at the sides of the chin. Synonym(s): whisker, mustache, malar streak.

Since I haven't done a "Learning about birds" post in a while I'll add a few neat facts about these very cool birds:

- A Pileated Woodpecker pair stays together on its territory all year round. It will defend the territory in all seasons, but will tolerate floaters during the winter.
- The Pileated Woodpecker digs characteristically rectangular holes in trees to find ants. These excavations can be so broad and deep that they can cause small trees to break in half.
- The feeding excavations of a Pileated Woodpecker are so extensive that they often attract other birds. Other woodpeckers, as well as House Wrens, may come and feed there.

This marks my 125th post to this blog. :)

Equipment Update . . .

Well, I shot a few photos yesterday in the gloomy weather of some birds on the feeders. Here is a photo of a female Pileated Woodpecker shot through my sliding glass door with the following settings:

ISO 1600
400mm (hand-held)
f/5.6
1/60 sec

The noise level is quite low for the conditions and I'm very pleased by that. There is a bit of Luminance Noise, but really no Color noise to speak of in the photo. You can click on the photo to see a larger version of the photo on my Flickr account. I applied no corrections to this photo at all. This is straight off the camera, converted to JPEG and uploaded to Flickr. The largest version (1024x768) shows the result pretty well, although when zoomed to 1:1 on the RAW file, you do see some noise in the background. Either way, I'm still very pleased with my setup!

Additional Comment Added: I realized after making this post that I did have the default Noise Reduction on in Adobe Lightroom which is a setting of Luminance = 0 and Color = 25. After setting the Color to 0, there is more color noise than I initially thought. However, with the default Color Noise reduction of 25, and a Luminance Noise reduction setting of about 45, the noise is knocked down/out and produces a very acceptable photo.