• Tuesday-What'sUP January 13 - 09:20 am

Donna MacIntosh has a way with critters, especially the birds that flock to her feeders in Baraga. She knows just what to put out there to attract them and they even wait in the wings for a turn at the delicacies she fills their tummies with.

The story behind the first photo here, is that there was one Pileated Woodpecker sitting the in the trees watching the feeder action, when the other one took off from the feeders and thought it was going to share a tree trunk. He thought wrong, not today and Donna captured it…a bit fuzzy, but still pretty cool!

The rest of the photos are just so neat, to see the smaller and bigger woodpeckers sharing the feeders like this. Donna has snapped shots in the past with two Pileated Woodpeckers sharing her peanut butter feeder and as a matter of fact, they were featured almost a year ago, on January 17, 2014. I'm thinking that the concoction she cooks up to fill her feeder with is something pretty amazing if they wait in line to get some.

Cool pictures!! I love woodpeckers!!

Nice pix...the first one looks like "The Clash of the Woodpeckers".

Wow!!! A two-fer! Thanks for the great pictures!!

Woodpeckers, any type, are so interesting! Thanks, Donna, for capturing and sharing these marvelous images.

The second picture has a downy woodpecker on the
left, and the third picture has hairy woodpeckers.
Great visitors to have!

WOW! Thanks Mary and everyone! I LOVE the birds
and the other critters that come through....I am
making the suet mix weekly...I swear every
woodpecker in Baraga eats here! LOL

1# Lard
1/2 jar peanut butter
1/4 bag Meal Worms (I get them at Shopko)
Sunflower seed

Melt it all together and pour in a bread pan and
in the fridge it goes...then I fill the feeder
with it. And go through lots of latex gloves doing
it!

What the birds drop...the deer clean up. I was
watching a couple of them the other nite...they
are like little vacuum cleaners....amazing.

The sun is out!! Enjoy!!

These are probably the best pictures around clearly showing the difference between Downy and Hairy woodpeckers.

Hi
I had a downy woodpecker take seed from my hand last Saturday, at a "chickadee chowdown" at Kensington metropark near Brighton, MI. There were around 10 of us willing to stand stockstill in the cold and have birds come to eat from our hands. Chickadees were the boldest, but tufted titmice were there, and as I say, one downy woodpecker. A red-bellied woodpecker and some cardinals came in to check things out but didn't feed from us.

A great study on birds this morning. The pileated woodpecker is a grand bird. They can be very elusive at times but I guess home cooking is just to much to resist..

Kathyrn, I've noticed that chickadees, though small, are very bold and the much larger cardinals and Bluejays are more skittish.:>

Thus the old saying instead of "Sisu", it's "tougher than woodpecker lips".

So, how do you folks pronounce "pileated"? I've
heard "pill-ee-ated," "pile-ated," and even "pile-
ee-ated."

Marge, I've always heard it pronounced "pill-ee-ated".

Marge: Pill-ee-ated is the pronunciation in my part of the world.

Thanks 4 sharing.