I Found the Neighborhood Flicker

Vivian, an old friend that lives a few blocks away, told me there is a northern flicker in the neighborhood. Every time I talked to her it had just been there, but I never saw it.

Tall dead trees, or dead tops of trees (snags), are a boon to birds and birders. Apparently birds like to get up high and have a look around. When there are up there they are easy to see. I finally found the flicker in a eucalyptus snag on the east side of the neighborhood, two blocks from Vivian's house. I shouldn't have doubted.

Northern (red-shafted) flicker

I didn't get a great photo since it was far away. Northern flickers come in two types, ones with a reddish color in the shafts of the feathers (red-shafted) and ones with yellow in the shafts (yellow-shafted). Yellow-shafted northern flickers are very rare here; we have the red-shafted northern flicker. They can be found around town in the winter but head back north and up to the mountains to nest in the spring.

We also have gilded flickers, a whole different species mostly found in upland deserts where it makes holes in saguaros. It is superficially similar to the yellow-shafted northern flicker.

The merlin in my last post was on a different eucalyptus snag, but in the same part of the neighborhood.

There are still some wintering birds I expect to see in the neighborhood but haven't yet. Foremost among them is ruby-crowned kinglet. It's usually not hard to find in large trees in the winter. I thought there would be enough trees in the neighborhood that I would come across one.

As a consolation, there are a few wintering yellow-rumped warblers around. I found this one in a mesquite tree on Seneca near Catalina High School.

Yellow-rumped warbler

Let me know what birds you see around your, or our, neighborhood. Maybe it's one I haven't documented yet.

Meanwhile, "yay" for snags and mesquite trees!