northeast-flora-and-fauna

For Throwback Thursday, here's a Hairy Woodpecker I met a little over 5 years ago. This woodpecker is easy to confuse with its smaller but more common cousin, the Downy Woodpecker . A little like crows/ravens, you'd easily tell them apart if you saw them together; by weight the Hairys are over twice as big as the Downys. Fortunately while Hairys have approximately the size of beak you'd expect in a woodpecker, the Downys have a much shorter beak in proportion to the rest of their body. Most of the time I'm pretty confident in IDing these 2 birds if I get a good look . Although they're both relatively small by our standards, their bigger size and longer beak made the Hairy more suitable for pecking at tough tree trunks while Downys smaller size is better for foraging on smaller branches. They've both adapted to slightly different ecological roles. The Hairy Woodpecker also interacts with other woodpeckers in different ways: They'll sometimes follow Pileated ...

Last month I heard someone rapping on a tree, assumed I was seeing a Downy Woodpecker , and snapped a couple pictures before it flew off. Although Downies are photogenic enough, I was pleasantly surprised when I developed the pictures (days) later and discovered this was the Downy's larger, less common cousin, the Yellow-bellied Sapsucker . Like the Downy and Hairy Woodpeckers , the Yellow-bellied Sapsucker is a small, mostly black-and-white woodpecker where the males can have some red on the head. But there are differences. The Yellow-bellied Sapsucker has red on the front of the head (both males and females) and red on the throat (only males) while the Downy and Hairy Woodpeckers males have red on the back of the head.  One thing you probably shouldn't count on is to find the yellow belly on the Yellow-bellied Sapsucker. While they can have a pale yellow belly, it's sometimes pretty darned pale. And from a distance I'd be more inclined to describe them as off-white-be...

Here's a butterfly that you might be able to see this time of the year or earlier, a Mourning Cloak . I found this one a little over 3 weeks ago here in NJ. Because this species can overwinter as adults, they're ready to flutter pretty much as soon as the temperatures warm up. I've heard they can sometimes be seen even in the middle of winter if we get a string of unusually warm days, though March 8 is the earliest I've personally seen one. Another reason these butterflies can be seen this time of year is that they're not dependent on flower nectar for food, actually preferring to drink tree sap, and flowers are still a little scarce this time of year. They have to be careful though, since Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers drill holes to get sap flowing but will frequently return to their holes to gobble up insects that were attracted to the sap. The Mourning Cloak's lifestyle almost certainly puts it on the menu of the Yellow-bellied Sapsucker. I suspect that their un...