2015 Flashback - A Great Bird

Design - "Curious Carrot"

Designer - Ewe & Eye & Friends

Fabric - 40 count Sandstone linen

Fibers - Anchor

Started - 9 August 1998

Completed - 12 August 1998 

 Friday afternoon September 11th, 2015 while sitting on the Front Porch with Padma and Parvati Hufflepuff, a bird caught my eye, and as luck would have it, it was a New Bird! 

It was a Lewis's Woodpecker!  You know how I love native plants named for the explorers William Clark, and Meriwether Lewis.  Well, I'm also gaga for birds named for those two men.  

All About Birds notes,"On the expedition’s return journey across the Bitteroot Mountains (in 1805), the team was forced by winter weather to camp on the Kooskooskie River, near present-day Kamiah, Idaho. Here, Meriwether Lewis secured a new avian species he would name the “black woodpecker.” In 1811, famed bird artist Alexander Wilson used Lewis’s specimens at Charles Peale’s Philadelphia Museum to sketch and describe the holotype for the Lewis’s Woodpecker—which he dubbed Picus torquatus, the “woodpecker with a necklace.”

According to the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, "This medium-sized ... woodpecker relies on flycatching during the spring and summer and store mast (like acorns) in the fall and winter. Formerly widespread in Oregon, it is currently common year-round only in the white oak-ponderosa pine belt east

of Mt. Hood. It also breeds in low numbers in open habitat along east Oregon river and stream valleys."

I even got to watch and document it catching and eating flying insects.

Yum!

The Lewis's Woodpecker stayed in the area for 30 minutes or more.  It is probably the only time I will see it close to my house as it prefers the more open forests of Central Oregon. I was just so pleased that I happened to be outside when this lovely glossy green/black woodpecker with the dark red head and rosy breast stopped by for dinner.