The workshop roof does keep the rain out, but has open eaves letting others in. This time it was a visiting yellow shafted flicker.
Finding the Visiting Yellow Shafted Flicker
With the arrival of almost nightly frosts, old blankets and towels are in daily evidence in my garden. Each morning these need to be removed for the day.
Orange Cat likes exploring my garden as so many interesting animals live there, interesting to him anyway. He caught a pack or wood rat as I was weeding. It was too big and escaped to continue raiding my garden.
This time Orange leaped up at the workshop window along one edge of the garden. The flicker was hanging on the inside of the window.
What Are Flickers?
Only the yellow shafted flicker occurs in my part of the Ozarks. It’s a brown backed woodpecker with a white rump patch and yellow under its wings.
These birds are welcome around my garden although they don’t often come. Their favorite food is ants. I don’t mind ants, but they tend to overpopulate the garden.
Ants like a wide variety of produce and dig holes in things like tomatoes. Their colonies appear under every rock, piece of cardboard, bucket and in the raised beds.
Usually visiting yellow shafted flickers are off along the creek banks raiding the ant colonies there. They take off as soon as I come into sight. This means safety for them and disappointment for me as they are beautiful birds I would like to see close up.
My Chance
Although the flicker in the workshop was not trapped, it had forgotten how it got in. It was a bold bird, staying hanging on the window as I went inside with my camera.
The doors at each end of the workshop make inviting exits for most birds visiting in the workshop, usually sparrow and wrens, occasionally hummingbirds.
The flicker ignored the open doors choosing to fly up to the rafters. There it flew to the end of the room and went out the way it came in: under the roof peak.
