We were sitting on the side deck the other afternoon and I heard a slap; an odd sound that turned out to be a large piece of bark being ripped off a tree by this guy. After making the noise, he went to the birch tree shown here and I got a nice picture of him after grabbing my camera. Then he moved to an extremely rotted stump ten feet away.
And he stayed right there pounding away.
I kept taking pictures with my 200mm lens. He stayed right there. I ran into the house and grabbed camera No. 2 with 600mm telephoto. Steadying the large lens on the deck railing, I got more pictures while this bird worked at least 30 more minutes as Murphy and I looked on.
Last week when we visited the no-name pond after a long period, we noticed several ducks fly off as we approached. They ended up at the other end and after about thirty minutes, they started to swim back toward us. They never did get very close, however, so no reasonable images were collected. The image I did get was of a wood duck, one of the silliest looking creatures in the wild. Here you can make out it’s colorful and goofy headware (this the male, the ladies look normal). I always describe them as a duck which is wearing a stolen clown costume.