Okay, I think it is time to hit the bookstore and find a better field guide for birds. I keep running across birds that do not show up in my guide at all, but in this particular case, I can’t even find it using a number of field guides on the web. Oh, and by the way, I especially liked the online guide I found today that basically made me pick the name of the bird from a drop down list in order to see what it looks like… if I knew that… nevermind. I do have a lot of successes using the Google image search, but struck out on this latest bird. Unfortunately, I was rushing around trying to find the camera and make it back before this bird decided to fly off. As a result, all you get is some fuzzy pictures, but you should be able to get a good feel for what it looked like. It has NEVER shown up again and quite frankly glad I even got one picture of it.
So now you are probably asking yourself… “When is he going to show me the bird?”. Well, here you go. I’ll start with a side shot that gives a good view of the side markings.
It is clearly clinging to the side of the tree similar to a woodpecker, but I looked through all the typical woodpeckers and nothing came close to resembling this bird. I thought the distinctive white bars on the wing and the solid brown/tan head would be a clear giveaway… but no luck. Here is another side view which gives a very good view of the beak shape and a little crisper on the coloring.
