New comer to the feeder

This guy showed up this morning and offered about ten minutes of viewing up close. The feeder is only 8-10 feet outside the window from the computer desk and has been a source of hours of fun watching. Hairy, downy and red bellied woodpeckers are common on the suet as are chickadees, nuthatches and even blue jays but a piliated woodpecker never. At least not on the feeders this close to the house. Once these big guys find a food source they like to re-visit so hopefully I’ll be able to see it all winter. Maybe better get more suet cakes….lol. This guy can eat.

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I hope you can keep that suit feeder full if you have wood siding on your house. I stopped feeding suit 2 years ago after they destroyed my cedar siding. I love seeing them, but half the front of my house is now wood filler

That’s great Tom, I love the Pileated’s! I leave the dead trees in my woods(backyard) standing for them. We usually keep them all winter, and I love watching them. Yes, they can sure tear up a suet cake. Last week one managed to hammer open the suet cage…of course, the pup ate the suet and proceeded to get the runs.
Our latest additions to the backyard are the Evening Grosbeaks, and a bunch of grouse in the crab-apple tree(as opposed to the traditional partridge/pear tree thing).
Keep the bird pics and posts coming, I enjoy them a lot!
No sign of this guy yet this year…

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We see the Piliateds out in the park trees just about every day but its odd for us to see one this close to the house. I see quite a few in the deer stand too.

I have feral cats here in town as big as that bob. One is particularly troublesome and he may have to get lead poisoning. I don’t mind cats that are kept indoors, but not the feral variety. Nice pic of the bob though.

Unfortunately the rats forced us to take our nut feeder for the woodpeckers down.. No, I don’t mean tree rats, literally rats.

Very cool, Tom. I like pileated woodpeckers and they almost look prehistoric to me. They’re just so much bigger than the usual tweety birds I see.

Pug, so you had a rat feeder, then huh? LOL!

Very cool. I get them every once in a while on the suet here in the south metro. Almost the size of a crow!

Very cool. I get them every once in a while on the suet here in the south metro. Almost the size of a crow!

And pug, you probably know a whole lot about rats, lizards, and black racers!

I am discovering and learning. It’s an interesting and welcome byproduct to moving.

Pug when we lived in Texas along the gulf coast rats were everywhere. We went camping in one of the Bayous and the guy I was with said we had to tie our shrimp bait up in a tree to keep it away from the rats, I said why not put it in the cooler and he said they would chew through the plastic cooler wall so that would do no good. We tied the bag of shrimp out on a limb with a string 6′ off the ground and it hung down about 2′ from the limb. We woke up the next morning and the rats had climbed the tree, chewed through the string to drop the shrimp to the ground and ate it all. Rats are everywhere and lots of them and that’s why they don’t kill snakes where we were at, so they could eat the rats.

Sorry Tom, I didn’t mean to hijack the post. Some things flip a switch in my head.

Yeah Mossy, they were getting the peanut ball off a hanging feeder. They have no problem climbing trees for food.

My neighbor that moved used to have traps. I think that kept them under control. We’d see one once in a while scurrying on the fence, but then it got to the point we’d see a dozen in the tree and on the ground by the feeder.

Then my neighbor told me the other neighbor on the other side saw my hanging feeder and was going to ask to take it down. He also said there are idiots in our neighborhood who kill every snake that they see. The first year I saw racers, corn snakes and a Scarlet king snake. Now I rarely see any, its been a long time. People are idiots. I even heard they removed a 5′ alligator from the pond that didn’t even pose a threat other than it was an alligator. I wish we could call and relocate people.

Back to the pileated, we have them come around, but they never came to the feeder. However the downy loved it, as did the very vocal carolina wrens.

What the heck. Why can’t you use an image address to post the photos inline?

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Rats to the south, crows to the north….vermin are everywhere. I just came in from the “hunt” and had to bag up 5 crows. There must have been 40 here today waiting mess with our feeders. I sure wish they make an air powered shotgun that shoots a reloadable shell. With the crow problem this town has I wish they’d allow shotguns with target loads and small shot.

The wife had me hang a deer rib cage a few years back for the birds. Boy did that bring in the birds. Wood peckers went nuts over it including several pileated. We also ended up with a large red tail hawk coming in. Caught it one morning trying to fly off with the rib cage.

I hung a deer carcass that had been fleshed out pretty good from the clothesline pole one year and the birds did enjoy it. The neighbors not so much. No sense of humor. Even the cop thought it was a great idea just not in town. I let the neighbors squawk until the crows showed up then took it down.

Funny you should mention crows…

They are in their winter murders by the hundreds. A couple neighbors have Camphor trees. They will be soaring around and hanging out until one ventures into a camphor tree. Then its like a vacuum sucking them all into the tree. Its pretty cool to see.

I never thought about crows and ravens…we have a lot of them around pretty much all winter, but they don’t seem to bother our feeders. They’ll occasionally hit the corn I scatter for the, um…turkeys(because feeding deer around here is illegal now) but that’s about it. It’s pretty rural here, and they’re all over the deer carcasses hunters feel the need to dump along the gravel roads…but I wonder why they don’t bother us the rest of the time?
The bobcat is a long and interesting story, I should post it sometime with other pics.
Feral cats are the worst. Where I grew up along the Mississippi in central Ill, feral cats have destroyed the small game and songbird populations. Fortunately, where I live they’re rare. We have lots of critters around that find cats tasty morsels, from foxes to wolves and plenty of large birds as well. Just about now, there should be some Snowy Owls putting in an appearance in my part of the state-another really amazing bird; hope to see one or two this winter.
Pug-what’s up with the camphor trees?(I just today learned that they were a tree, so…)

The blue jays chased one away that we had for a few days.