As I made my way  up to the feeding station yesterday morning that I have set up on Haldon recently it was obvious that I would have to change my tack if I was not going to have a wasted day.  It was really dull and the kind of day when you would only be able to take portraits and any thoughts of continuing with my experiments with inflight photography would have to be put on hold.  This was fine because I really wanted to get some nice photos of the Great spotted Woodpeckers there.  I pulled some scrub together around the stump of a felled tree and then slung some camo netting over the front to wait out the arrival of a woodpecker.  It was a bit cramped but almost immediately the Coal Tits and then Nuthatches started to come to the peanuts which I had put at the base of a weathered old branch. I took lovely photos of Nuthatches which are in my opinion a great little bird. They are feisty and dominant over the small tits and from time to time one would come down that was obviously a male with much darker terracotta red feathers on the flanks and a proud bossy demeanour.  

It was worth sitting in the cramped position to get this photo but from a photographers point of view, quite hard. The light was very poor which meant that I had the camera set with a slow shutter speed, any movement from the bird would be captured in the picture and show movement blur. 

I have taken hundreds of Nuthatch pictures in the past but with photography every day is different, new light and a new location as well as different behaviour and a different bird but what is constant is the characteristic pose of a Nuthatch.  As I sat there quietly and concealed, suddenly there was a woodpecker.  This time it was a female, if you look at the nape of a Great spotted Woodpecker there is a red patch but on the female this red is absent. You can see this in the picture below.  This means that there are at least 3 different individuals coming to the feed here, I have had two males together and now of course, the female. Thats not to say that when I have had individual males it has always been the same one. and you will never know?   What I find  fascinating is that newly fledged birds have a red forehead which is absent in both adults, in short, baby woodpeckers are more colourful than their parents.

A shot of a female Great spotted Woodpecker showing the absence of red on the nape.

Its quite interesting to see what this bird is doing.  The trunk that it is on was where I had put peanuts previously proving to me that this bird had fed there before.  It had a really good root around looking for any remaining.  Woodpeckers are said to be a bit stupid? But this proves that there was some cognitive behaviour going on and the bird had "remembered" where it had found food before.  Who knows what other thought processes are taking place. However it was too stupid to come to the pile of nuts only 10 feet to its left!