Woodpeckers

We spent the morning in a cold and windy Balblair woods in the off-chance of a sighting of an early-returned osprey, without luck, but the woods vibrated to the....

....hammering of woodpeckers. The noise is impressively loud, created by choosing dead trees, such as the two in the centre of this picture, but although we could hear the male's frantic drumming in them we couldn't see him. While woodpeckers feed on grubs and other invertebrates they prise from under the bark of trees, the noise at this time of year is to attract a mate.

We walked until the path ran out on the little peninsula which we associate with our first and only sighting of ospreys last summer, where we watched these five swans - too far away for me to identify.

A little patience on the way back enabled us to see two woodpeckers, a pair, one of which was drumming and then chasing its mate around the canopy. They didn't seem too worried by our close approach though they were very difficult to spot in the high pines.

Sadly the camera was determined to focus on the tree trunk rather than the bird but we see enough to identify this as one of the spotted woodpeckers and, since it was definitely bigger than a sparrow, it's a greater spotted. The woodpecker didn't co-operate enough to show us the top of its head but there's no sign of a red crown so this is probably a female.

We counted three separate drummings so there is no shortage of woodpeckers in these woods, further evidence coming from the large number of possible nest holes.