Pileated Woodpeckers are active in the woods right now, active in a variety of ways. They’re busy foraging, pecking large holes in trees, creating nests and working on starting this year’s brood. I was photographing a pair working woods yesterday afternoon with what I assume was the male working for hours on a nest hole in a dead tree. There was quite bit of flying back and forth in the woods from both male and female. As I tracked this action with camera in hand, the pair stopped for less than a minute for a ‘romantic’ interlude. The female being on the back side of a tree limb made these photos more PG than R. They both went right back to work following the “job of sex’. I have a question for my birder friends. Do you pronounce it pill-e-aited or pile-ated? I used to say pill-e-aited myself but was told by a birder a few years back that it is pile-ated. Just curios what others use.
