‘ve had a couple of nice encounters with Downy Woodpeckers of late, and thought I’d share them.

This is a nice audio recording I captured on April 23 of a male Down Woodpecker drumming on a snag that had different thicknesses, and so he was able to get different sounds out of different parts of the wood.

And yesterday I captured a male Downy Woodpecker carrying out his nesting duties, including feeding the young, entering the cavity to retrieve and carry away a fecal sac (about 36 seconds into the video), and defending the nest from a Hairy Woodpecker (at the 2:31 minutes mark). Over the course of the 20 minutes this filmed, the male fed the young 15 times — most of which was identifiable as flying ants.