Sunday, October 03, 2010

Nutty Great Spotted Woodpecker


While I was emptying the moth trap this morning, in the garden, I heard a kick from a Great Spotted Woodpecker and looked up to see it in one of next door's trees. Then it flew off and I thought it was a goner. A few minutes later I heard tapping from the end of the garden, and the Great Spot (the red patch on the nape shows its a male) was up to the classic trick of getting a hazelnut (from one of our hazels), wedging it into a crevice in a little apple tree (always the same tree, we use to hang feeders from) and bashing hell out of it to extract the nutty goodness.
Luckily it did this long enough for me to pop inside for my digiscoping kit. It was too dark and rainy for stills, but I did manage this sequence of videos. Note the bit at the end when the pecker shuffled up the tree and an opportunist Great Tit came for the spoils...

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