Couples

Today's post is only indirectly about bugs - well, arthropods, anyway - and all I have are pictures of birds.

Backyard Birds of the Day:

There was a pair of downy woodpeckers in the trees in front of the house today. At least I think there was a pair. There could have been more than two; it was hard to keep track with the amount of flitting from tree to tree, but there were at least two, a male and a female. This is the female.

  Woodpeckers eat bugs (at least some of them do. And I know they don't all eat bugs exclusively, but let's just go with the woodpeckers eat bugs thing for a while here). I watched the two woodpeckers go from tree to tree, up and down the trunks, obviously looking for bugs to eat, and from the looks of things, finding them, too.

 See? Here she appears to be plucking something off the tree. I wondered what they could be finding, because there are not a lot of bugs out there at the moment (particularly because today was pretty cold again) and then I remembered all of the tree trunks I have seen that are covered in hundreds of snow fleas/springtails. I have posted pictures a few times, but probably not enough to really give an accurate view of how many of these things are around at the moment. I don't want to bore you, after all. But I will tell you this: the snow fleas are on a lot of the trees, and they are there in the hundreds, possibly thousands. So if you happen to live on a diet of bugs (or bug-like things, since springtails are not technically insects), there are plenty of them to eat. Of course, they are tiny, so you would have to eat an awful lot of them (which sounds pretty awful, really).

 View of the interesting markings on the back of the female.

Here's the male. I'll bet you can guess in what way the male and female are sexually dimorphic. Did you guess that they are dichromatic? Yes, you probably did, but maybe you didn't use that word. It means that the coloring is different on the males and females, and in this case the male has a red mark on the back of its head.

 Woodpecker in action.

 The obligatory flying away shot.

Another thing I found interesting today was that I saw several species of birds that I did not see the other day when I had all those different species at the bird feeder. I saw all of these in the front yard today (the bird feeder is in the back). There were the downy woodpeckers, chickadees (didn't get a picture of those), robins, and...

Finches - I think the species is house finch. I think this is the male...

... and this is the female. I know, not good pictures, but it was dark and gloomy today. Anyway, you can probably at least see that they are dichromatically sexually dimorphic. They are in trees in these pictures, but they were mostly foraging on the ground for food (along with other birds like juncos). They could do this because two days of rain have finally melted most of the snow in front of the house (not in the backyard, though. I don't think that snow is ever going to leave).