I put Will down for his afternoon nap, walked gingerly into the next room, glanced out the window and discovered it was back.

“It” was the pileated woodpecker that had visited my yard last month. I’m only assuming it was the same one. I felt fortunate enough to have been visited by one pileated woodpecker. I can’t imagine that suddenly several of them are clamoring to peck at the trees on my property.

It’s a female. The male and female pileated woodpecker look similar except for a streak of red (mustache) on the males. This one didn’t have a mustache.

I made a bee-line for the camera and quickly discovered that — as close as we were to each other — a few million twigs and branches stood between me and a nice photograph of a female pileated woodpecker. No matter where I stood, kneeled or sat, I couldn’t get an angle to get a clean shot of the impressive bird.

I had resigned myself to simply appreciating the visit and the fact that the bird was back. She was intently working on a dead tree in the backyard. Actually it’s only half of a tree — the bottom half, obviously.

This particular dead half of a tree (otherwise known as a snag) has a large hole near the top and several thousand smaller holes throughout the rest of it. I’ve seen squirrels, hairy woodpeckers and tufted titmice take refuge in the large hole. The smaller holes were created by woodpeckers looking for a treat.

It’s quite an attraction for woodpeckers and other insect-eating birds. Red-bellied woodpeckers in particular are drawn to the tree, but I’ve also seen downies and hairies, as well as nuthatches. 

The tree is dead as a doornail and it’s my favorite tree on the property.

I wrote in a column long ago — before I even moved to my current house — about the importance of keeping a dead tree or two or more on your property. This tree justifies those earlier ramblings. Not that I would condone transporting dead trees to your property, but if a tree happens to die or snap in half, why not leave it there? You never know what will visit.

As I zipped up the camera bag, resigned to simply looking at the pileated woodpecker, the crow-sized bird left the tree and flew up to the suet feeder. The feeder is in an awkward position as far as getting a photo from the house, but I made the effort to get a shot. I had to lean out one of the upstairs windows and shoot across my body, but I managed to get a decent shot. I hoped the whole time that my neighbors weren’t watching. They would probably wonder what I was up to.

The pileated woodpecker was just the tip of the iceberg that day. For this cold winter day anyway, my property was Woodpecker Central.

The pileated remained all day. Red-bellied woodpeckers visited the green-caged suet feeder as well as my home-made drilled-log suet feeder.

Downies were abundant, as usual. Downy woodpeckers are perhaps the most reliable species on my property — if the suet feeders are filled, that is.

At one point I looked out an upstairs window and saw a downy on one side of a tree trunk and a hairy woodpecker on the other side. Had I been prepared, that would have been the photo to take. Of course the moment lasted only, well, a moment. The hairy continued up the tree and the downy flew off to visit the green cage. The moment was a good opportunity to see just how different (or similar) the two species are. It took me years to confidently differentiate between the species without a point of comparison.

So that was four woodpecker species in one day. I usually see downies and red-bellieds every day. Hairy woodpeckers visit only occasionally and pileateds visit  … well, they’ve visited twice so far.

It wasn’t too long ago that a northern flicker flew into the yard and briefly inspected one of my trees. This fall migration period a yellow-bellied sapsucker visited the yard for one day. Neither species showed up on this day — not that I really expected them to. A flicker would have been my best chance for a fifth species.

Hey, I’ll take four woodpecker species in one day. Four is about all a New Englander can really expect on one winter’s day, anyway. Red-bellieds are southern birds that are slowly working their way north. Black-backed woodpeckers are northern New England birds that do not venture even into central New England. They’re hard enough to find in northern New England.

In between, downies and hairies are fairly common. Pileated woodpeckers have a huge range, from Florida up into Canada. The large birds are not exactly common in New England, however, and do not visit backyards too often.

When one does visit, though, it’s memorable.

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