My brother-in-law (not the title character in this entry) just bought himself a fantastic digital SLR camera, and has been merrily snapping away. He stayed with us this past weekend, and after a light snowfall got this shot of a visitor in our driveway:
It's definitely a woodpecker, and he caught it just as it was taking flight. Thing is, it matches the pictures we looked up of a Gilded Flicker, but a guidebook I found says they only live in the desert. What was he doing in Boulder? I'll tell you what he was doing. He was eyeballing the siding of my house, sizing it up for a vicious pecking. We've been woken up a half dozen times at 6:00 a.m. by woodpeckers attacking the house. When we first moved here, I noticed a lot of houses had plastic owls hanging up, or drawings that looked like faces two ...
