Woodpecker – picture post from Scotland

Woodpecker – picture post from Scotland

I posted previously about a recent trip to Scotland when we spent time in St Catherines in Argyll and Bute on the Cowal peninsular.

We stayed in a quiet and fairly isolated cottage, nestled in an area of protected forest and close to the shore of Loch Fyne.

This woodpecker picture post from Scotland follows two earlier posts from that trip and that you can read at these links: Visit Scotland – Argyle and Bute and the Red squirrel picture post.

We can hear you but …

It was a real case of we can hear you but we just cant see you for much of our time there.

Despite spending what seemed like an age trying to pinpoint the direction and then location of the frequent loud tap tap taps of busy woodpeckers we had no luck at all in spotting them let alone managing to photograph them, until one of them became a regular in the garden outside our cottage. This in turn allowed us to take some decent pictures – some of which you can see in the picture gallery at the end of this blog post.

Great spotted woodpecker

I have written blog posts previously about the Great spotted woodpecker. If you haven’t seen them and want to check them out, you will find them at these links: Spotting the great spotted woodpecker, The great spotted woodpecker and Is there anybody who doesn’t love a woodpecker

In one of those posts I noted four quick facts about the woodpecker and I have repeated them again below

Four quick facts

– both the male and female woodpecker help to incubate the (white) eggs, these eggs take about 12 days or so to hatch;

– woodpeckers have been know to drum on other things than just trees – including metal poles and weather vanes;

– numbers have increased in the UK in the last 25 to 30 years;

– a male without a mate can drum as many as 600 times a day – about three times as many ‘drums’ as a male with a mate

Further reading

You can read more about the woodpecker here at the RSPB website

Picture gallery

The best way to view the pictures gallery is by clicking on any of the images below to open the gallery to scroll through.

 

 

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