If nothing else I’m learning something about Flickers.

Which are very common birds around here, and in over eleven years I never gave them much thought. Still don’t.

Every day I swap the mem card on that game camera I mounted at the cattle watering station, and every day I look at dozens of pictures of flickers, alone and in groups, sitting on the tire. Since starting that I was actually driven to learn a little something about Flickers. They’re basically ground-feeding woodpeckers, which doesn’t make a lot of sense. They also flock, which is not very woodpeckerlike behavior but who am I to judge? One day, you might remember, I saw a pic of what looked to me like an immature red-tail hawk, and what I found unusual about the picture is that there were several apparently unconcerned flickers in the same frame. Turns out I was wrong about the species of every one of the birds in the frame. Flickers at rest are not-very-decorative gray birds, and I originally called them black-throated sparrows and was corrected by a reader. But it turns out, a flicker in flight looks completely different. Yesterday afternoon I got a nice picture of one flying away…

…and in flight they’re not gray at all, but quite reddish – and with impressive wingspan for such a small bird. Almost looks like an immature red-tail hawk, if like me you don’t know anything about birds.

Look! It’s a black-coated Geezer!

I’ve brought the camera back to the Lair now, to fiddle with it a bit and then try to find a new location.