Mike in the Wild

It's been well over a month since I last visited my cabin in Prescott.  After a fifteenth consecutive year of bidding adieu in the early autumn, I knew I would miss the birds that inhabit the pine and oak trees that surround my forest retreat.  No more bridled bushtits and juniper titmice until at least the spring.  However shortly after I returned to Phoenix full-time, a quite familiar Prescott bird, a ladder-backed woodpecker, started paying regular visits to my desert hummingbird feeder for the very first time. This woodpecker is common in my neighborhood and the wide expanse of desert that encompasses Phoenix.  But the black and white creature is also quite common in Prescott where the elevation is over a mile high, creating a much colder and wetter climate: a welcome reprieve to the desert's unrelenting summer heat.  Interestingly, the ladder-backed seems to be the one and only woodpecker species that calls both environments a year-round home.  The fli...

It's the sqawks that get my attention in Phoenix.  And the peeps in Prescott.  Every so often it's the rattle or drumming in both places.  But once in a while I hear the long laugh of a bird from high in a tree.  They're all the calls of woodpeckers, but it's only the ladder-backed woodpecker that sounds like he's in this fit of laughter. While it's the acorn and hairy woodpeckers I see in Prescott, it's the Gila woodpecker and gilded flickers that I usually see in and around Phoenix.  But the ladder-backed appears in both locations:  cool mountain forests in the summer and mild deserts in the winter.  But the species is not migratory like me; instead it's much more tolerant of extremes in climate and will put up with both snow and blistering heat. It was on a chilly desert morning last weekend when I heard the distinctive cackle of the ladder-backed woodpecker in my Phoenix neighborhood.  I quickly identified two males high in a pine tree, wh...

One of birding's many rewards is that quite frequently a bird sighting for the twentieth time feels like the first.  I was just reminded of this treat very recently on an excursion to southern Arizona, where I actually did have a few first time encounters.  However one of my most memorable moments was  photographing a common species, a male ladder-backed woodpecker, in Sierra Vista. I've seen the bird quite a few times, throughout the deserts and neighborhoods around Phoenix, and in the mountains and woods around Prescott.  Like many other North American woodpeckers, it's mostly black and white, with the males showing some red on his crown.  And as the name infers, horizontal stripes on its back create a ladder pattern.  Until now, I viewed its shrill cackle of a call as its most distinguishing characteristic.   I've taken quite a few shots of the bird over the past year, with several of them actually turning out quite nicely.  But in Sie...