Terry saw it first. "Susan, look a Pileated Woodpecker." I grabbed my camera and worked with the setting sun to photograph. It's a female. How do I know? Males have a red stripe on the cheek.
The Pileated Woodpecker eats insects. It uses its long tongue to extract them from wood. Looks like she got one.
The Pileated Woodpecker’s primary food is carpenter ants, supplemented by other ants, woodboring beetle larvae, termites, and other insects such as flies, spruce budworm, caterpillars, cockroaches, and grasshoppers. They also eat wild fruits and nuts, greenbrier—that vine we see growing up the Live Oaks— hackberry, sassafrass, blackberries, sumac berries, poison ivy, holly, dogwood, persimmon, and elderberry. In some diet studies, ants constituted 40 percent of the diet, and up to 97 percent in some individuals.
Notice, no red stripe on the cheek. So this is a female.
Leaving dead tree limbs in natural areas is something we can do to help maintain habitat for woodpeckers, the Pileated and others, as well as nuthatches. Wildewood Springs has several areas that are not landscaped. Those areas are havens for wildlife.
"Woodpeckers rely on large, standing dead trees and fallen logs—something that property managers may consider undesirable. It’s important to maintain these elements both for the insect food they provide and for the many species of birds and mammals that use tree cavities." - Audubon
