Several years ago when I first started taking photos of birds, I remember how excited I was when I photographed a woodpecker that looked like this one. It had red on its head, so surely, I thought, it was a Red-headed Woodpecker. Oh, how naive I was back then about the complexities of identifying birds.
Sometimes with age comes a bit of wisdom. I am now pretty confident in identifying this bird as a Red-bellied Woodpecker (Melanerpes carolinus), though I must confess that I have never seen a single spot of red on the belly of a Red-bellied Woodpecker.
Like the Red-headed Woodpecker that I featured yesterday, the Red-bellied Woodpecker gathers and stores acorns for later use. As one of my readers pointed out in a comment on a previous posting, it is a mystery how the woodpecker remembers where it has stored the acorns and how it keeps other creatures from stealing its ‘treasures.”
© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.
Mike Powell 
she looks beautiful 🙂
Thanks.
Great pictures, Mike, and yes, it makes you wonder about the rational of the omithologists that named this bird. I think that they were hitting the sauce a little at the time! M 🙂
I’ve always thought that bird names were much harder than plant names but I thought it was just because I spent so much time studying plants. Maybe not!
We get visited by these woodpeckers a lot and yet every single time my kids gripe about its name being inaccurate. They are stunning birds whatever the accuracy of their name and your portraits of it are lovely.
You’d think they’d live up to or change their name.