Gila woodpeckers

June 28, 2017. This was a busy morning for the gila woodpeckers. I was hearing them striking metal to mark their territory every few minutes, it seemed. I was sitting underneath a eucalyptus tree when I spotted two of them far above me in the branches. It looked to a be a male and a female starting to get friendly with each other, but from my angle it was hard to see the tops of their heads and tell for sure. (Males have red tops, female brown.) Suddenly another male swooped in and chased the other male off. The female, left alone, sat on the branch for a few moments, then flew off in another direction.

From Wikipedia Commons. Picture taken at Arizona Sonora Desert Museum.

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