This is my day 18 contribution to Becky’s April Square Tops photo challenge.
A male Yellow-bellied Sapsucker near the top of a post. Photographed near Punnichy, Saskatchewan in the spring.
Categories
This is my day 18 contribution to Becky’s April Square Tops photo challenge.
A male Yellow-bellied Sapsucker near the top of a post. Photographed near Punnichy, Saskatchewan in the spring.
9 replies on “Almost at the Top”
Such a lovely bird. I love the red portion of its head. I wonder what species of bird it is?
It’s a male Yellow-bellied Sapsucker which is a member of the woodpecker family. So called because they peck rows of small holes in trees to drink the sap that forms and eat any insects caught in the sap.
I hazarded a guess that it might be a woodpecker based on the position it was on the tree. I watched a lot of Woody Woodpecker cartoons LOL! It is a really pretty bird.
what a fabulous photograph of a woodpecker, loving the colours. I’ve never heard of the sapsucker species, I clearly need to come to Canada!
They’re not popular with some people as it’s claimed they kill trees by drilling their sap wells but if that was the case some of the sap bearing tree species popular with them would have become extinct long ago. I suspect that some already sick trees may die faster due to sap wells but not healthy trees.
They can’t take enough sap to kill a tree surely. Think you must be right with your theory
No but if they ring the trunk with wells it can kill a tree. It’s called girdling (or something similar) but my theory is that if they need that many sap wells then there isn’t much sap flowing so the tree could be sick already. They’ve been harvesting sap for thousands of years, they must know what they’re doing.
Unlike us humans!
[…] of us though have been dealt a top deck with your beautiful captures and […]