Nuttal Neighbor

In the first My Side of the Mountain post, I mentioned that there is a Nuttal's woodpecker who drums on an old oak out back.  Here is a brief video of the habitat, and you can hear the drumming at the start and end of the video.

Although the dominant tree species shown here is California Bay Laurel, there are a few overshadowed oaks in the middle of all that.  Nuttal's is a small woodpecker, with a black-and-white, barred back, confined primarily to the oak woodlands of California.   Interestingly, although Nuttall's Woodpeckers are nearly confined to oak woodlands, they do not eat acorns, instead going for insects and arthropods, and some fruit.


Although I couldn't get a clear photo through the foliage, I was able to glimpse the distinctive features of the Nuttall's, at least enough for identification.  Nuttall’s color pattern is distinct from other woodpecker species in this area, easily distinguishable at a glance due to the barring on the back and the single red patch.  The other two species here from the same genus, Picoides, are the hairy woodpecker and the downy woodpecker.  Although they both also have the single red patch on the rear crown, they also have a broad white patch on their back instead of the barring of the Nuttall's. 

This watershed supports 7 species of woodpeckers, from 5 different genus’s of the family Picidae. Additional woodpecker species seen locally include: acorn woodpecker, Lewis’s woodpecker, red-shafted northern flicker, Red-breasted sapsucker, and a personal favorite - the pileated woodpecker.  There is a pair of pileated woodpeckers which frequent the local area, and I'll have a post on them in the future.   

References:

Cornell Lab of Ornithology - http://www.allaboutbirds.org/

Cornell Lab of Ornithology - The Birds of North America Online (A. Poole, Ed.). Ithaca: Cornell Lab of Ornithology; Retrieved from the Birds of North America Online:http://bna.birds.cornell.edu/bna/species/