OH! MY! GOSH! Yes, I'm shouting out of sheer excitement. Just saw my first Pileated Woodpecker here on the Piedmont since I moved here in 1986. More at the end of this post.

Keeping alive, at least for what I hope is another year, a tradition started by Raptor within the Mudcat community. Understand the community is smaller and also that many folks are more likely to discuss such things on other social media sites now. But I'm a geezer and feel most at home here. Will stick with Raptor's "rules."

Keep a list of all the birds you observe or hear and can conclusively identify from your yard. (or other annually fixed location.) I often see Canada Geese, Killdeer, Great Blue Herons and other waterfowl on my drive through the country to and from work, but they don't go onto my fixed locale list. I see purple martins and seagulls from the strip mall parking lot at the location where I do most of my grocery shopping. They don't go on my fixed locale list. My fixed locale is my yard, but it could be my office window, or for that matter, could be my local mall parking lot.

Share observations! Keep lists very specific to fixed locale, however. Seems to me fair game to keep multiple lists if one is up to it. Share lists at the end of the year. This old Mudcatter still enjoys the sharing within this community.

Happy Birdwatching!


Posted an hour or so ago on the 2013 bird thread and said I was going to start the 2014 thread. Got distracted by a couple of other threads, so had not done so.

My 'puter is arranged so that I am right by my big window where I can watch the birds in the front yard and most of the feeders. My attention was just grapped by a large movement out in the yard, and a Pileated Woodpecker just landed on a suet feeder! This is the first Pileated I have seen on the Piedmont since I moved here in 1986! They aren't rare, but are not common throughout much of the Piedmont, where there are not many large stands of woodland. I've lived either in small towns or in the middle of cleared farmland since I moved here. Have occasionally, when hiking in tracks of Duke Forest or Eno State Park heard them, but haven't seen one here for lo, these 17 1/2 years.

I love these birds, and am obviously thrilled to see one in my yard. They were common where I was raised, in WV. Love their attention-grabbing call as they power through the heavily forested woods of my homeland. We called them "Ginseng Birds" because they thrive in the same habitats as native patches of ginseng.