I rarely get photos that actually show these red shafts because they usually can’t be seen when the bird is perched and I seldom get photos of flickers in flight.
Relative size apparently makes no difference when birds are competing for nesting cavities. In this case the Northern Flickers are twelve times larger than the house wren (130 g vs 11 g).
I’ve returned home from my Montana/Idaho camping trip and overall the trip was spectacular but the good times were tempered by a nasty surprise on my first day there.
Northern Flickers tend to use existing nest cavities (rather than excavating new ones) more often than other woodpecker species and this bird followed that pattern.
Tension has been high between several species at the nest cavity tree. When we arrived yesterday morning this male Northern Flicker was inside the cavity and he spent considerable time enlarging the interior but a pair of Mountain Bluebirds took strong exception to his presence.
Though the Northern Flicker is common here in northern Utah I find them very difficult to approach. This morning I found one that had other things on its mind so it ignored me.
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