Northern Flicker
I ran into this bird about a week ago. All I saw was a shape moving up a tree. I didn't know what it was until I look at the photos.
"Although it can climb up the trunks of trees and hammer on wood like other woodpeckers, the Northern Flicker prefers to find food on the ground. Ants are its main food, and the flicker digs in the dirt to find them. It uses its long, barbed tongue to lap up the ants." - allaboutbirds.org
@Swede1952 That's a nice photo! This is my photo last fall. It was pecking into the ground, so I thought what a strange woodpecker...
@hkl Yea, I didn’t know about the flicker’s ground preference until reading about it this morning.
@Swede1952 I also had to look up "ground pecker" and found that it's actually a woodpecker that forages on the ground. It is a very interesting bird and has quite interesting feather patterns. I felt lucky to have seen it in action.
@hkl Quite interesting, when I saw the one in the photo, it looked as if a piece of the tree was moving. 😅
