Oros Preserve 2/24--Red-headed Woodpecker

Oros Preserve: Can you find the woodpecker?

I was visiting my mother today, going over paperwork and making phone calls. After 5 hours of that, having accomplished much, I rewarded myself with a trip to the nearby Oros Preserve before I headed home. When I pulled up to the curb, there was already a car parked there and man with bins walking the trail--"Another nut," I thought.

The trails are not cleared at the preserve and most of the snow has not melted, so it is slow and hard going, and even worse, some of the trails have turned into fast-running streams where the snow that has melted. I made a couple of iffy moves trying to stay on the trail; fortunately, I wear waterproof shoes. Eventually, I just followed the other birders footprints, and found him eventually around the bend at the end of a long path that looked out onto the frozen swamp. He was staking out a Red-headed Woodpecker, my goal for the trip.

While we waited for this local rarity to emerge from behind a tree, we chatted about listing birds and I admitted to keeping many different lists--life, state, county, backyard, township...you name it. "Well, here's one you probably don't do," he said, and proceeded to tell me about a woman he'd met down at the Bridge to Nowhere to who kept a list in which she had to list a unique bird each day of the year. "It's amazing," he said, "she got to 202 days in a row."

I smiled, and told him that A) not only do I know about that kind of listing, but B) I know the woman he met and that C) last year she beat me by one day. "Well," he replied, "I think it's a really neat idea and maybe I'll do it next year."

By this time I was thinking that the bird was not coming out from behind the tree or had flown without our seeing it, but it did eventually emerge and flew from dead tree to dead tree, actually getting closer to us instead of what usually happens (they fly away). Cropping and blowing up the photo above, here's the woodpecker, for documentary purposes only:

I was very happy to get the bird. Another case of look for the birder, not the bird. Nothing else of note was there today--a vulture, geese, a couple of gulls, a jay and a grackle.