My friend says the pileated woodpeckers look like prehistoric creatures! And really big.
Pileated woodpeckers are really big (about crow sized), and look very similar to the Ivory-billed woodpecker, which has been long thought to be extinct until just recently. I’ve never seen one in the wild, but my local natural history museum has a stuffed one on display. They truly are magnificent looking birds.
As to Mama Zappa’s orange-beaked mostly black looking bird of cardinal size, the only entry that I find close in my field guide (Audubon Society, tenth printing, 1983) is a starling. All of the other birds in the black section have dark beaks.
Unless that’s it, I’m lost on this one…however, it’s obvious that I need a new field guide.
I should note for the record that the link to the Kodak Falcon website isn’t down (as I erroneously claimed). Just the cameras are down for the season. The link still works, and you can learn all about falcons and the Kodak project while you wait for the birds to come back in the spring.
Oh, and betenoir?..it’s “LADDERbacked.”
The “latterbacks” are the Mormon subspecies. 
Since I’m still here: Pileated Woodpecker. They can be 17 inches from tip of beak to tip of tail.
[Donald Trump on Conan O’Brien}
“They’re HUUUUGE!”
[/DToCO’B]
Mama Zappa: was this orange-beaked blackish bird a perching bird (like a songbird) or a clinger (like a woodpecker)? Did you notice? That might help some.
Oh well geeze. Try and help someone and get called for spelling. Crawls back into her cave
My mom’s looking into the new bird sighting. I’ll let you know if she finds anything, I’ll let you know when she pulls me out of a pile of dirty blankets and Mormons in my cave.
I saw them perching on the branch above the suet feeder, and I remember seeing one sitting on top of the suet feeder reaching down to get its food. It wasn’t clinging to the mesh on the side for the food. Is that what you were getting at?
I googled pix of starlings and it didn’t look quite like that (there was nothing that looked like the starling’s white spots) but I know there can be variations so who knows.
::hugs betenoir respectfully and gingerly and humorously::
Not once, but twice! You’ve got “junkets” and “latterbacks” going on here. Please don’t take offence. My gentle ribbing is intended as very fun and cuddly and gracious…as am I…or so I imagine myself…to birds, anyway…
Mama Zappa: Perching on a branch makes them harder to tell apart, but when woodpecker-type birds get a chance, they tend to cling to the vertical sides of things, while perching birds (songbirds) tend to sit on top of things if they can. That’s not to say they can’t blend in, but if the birds you saw tended to perch on top of the suet feeder and reach over (as opposed to simply perching on the vertical side of it–as if it were a tree trunk) I’d be guessing that it’s a songbird rather than a woodpecker. So, yeah, that’s kind of what I was getting at.
I used to have a suet cage out, and the starlings would (mostly) land on the top and lean over to grab the suet; but the woodpeckers would land on the vertical side of the feeder and feed that way. Starlings DO like suet.
Starlings aren’t always speckled, either. It depends on how old they are, where they are in the breeding cycle, and also what part of the country they are from. They’re pretty much ubiquitous across the US (even though they aren’t native), so there are regional variations in plumage. Was the beak about the same? That might be a better indication than the white spots. Those can vary tremendously.
Ah - it might well be a starling then. I checked the Cornell page (was looking at the USGS page the other day) and the top picture here here looks more like what I saw the other day, than the pictures further down.
Then there are those guys who like to be upside down (white-breasted nuthatch, maybe?).
And now you’re keeping count!! I can’t spell on my best day. And this is far from my best day. But thanks Dijon spreads out some extra sunflower seed for Dijon
Could be. Young starlings don’t get the white spots until they’re older, and starlings are one of the most common birds in the US, even though they are not native. In fact, if memory serves: they, along with the English House Sparrow are the only two songbirds which are not protected in the US, because they are not native and are considered nuisance species. In short, starlings of some type should be common at any feeder station across the country, so it’s a good bet that you’re seeing juveniles.
Yep, nuthatches tend to feed upside down a lot, but they are much smaller, slate-gray on the back and white on the front with dark beaks.
peck, peck, peck
(I’m still waiting for my local radar to load over dialup…we’re having a “winter storm” today, I gather)
betenoir’s offer of sunflower seed reminded me of a birdfeeding episode that I had back in the day. I had purchased 10 pounds of an oil sunflower/safflower seed mix, and had shoveled about a pound or two onto my roof (didn’t put it in the feeders). About five minutes later, a flock of Rock Doves (“pigeons” to most city dwellers) descended, and proceeded to peck furiously at the roof. After about 10 minutes, they all flew away together, and the roof was CLEAN. Not a single seed was left.
I was used to them visiting and eating, but it was the only time that they had completely depopulated the seed supply. I tried it a few more times, but it never happend again.
Meh, I don’t know…it was just funny how thorough they were. They were daily feeders, but that day was surprising.
Bird feeding story…not probably interesting to anyone else.
I have a shallow pan in a little open “house” on top of a 5’ pole. I fill it with song-bird seed, which is sunflower and safflower with peanuts and some kind of berry in it. I also toss in a few peanuts and some corn. I get:
squirrels
blue-jays
doves, eurasian banded-neck, white-wing and mourning
cardinals
blackbirds, regular and red-wing
grackles, both the brown and the big irridescent boat-tails
And around my home, away from the feeder, out in the wild shrubbery behind the fence, I have these little goldfinches, some other kind of small bird, and mockingbirds.
Out in the woods, there are hawks, whipporwills, quail, owls, and high in the pine-trees, ospreys. The ospreys nest on the power-line poles near my home, and fish in the ponds nearby.
Got another poser for you - and this time I got a photo. The picture doesn’t do it justice - it was a very smooth gray color aside from the bars on the wings, with a cream front/underside. Looked to be roughly the size of a cardinal, give or take a bit. It was perched on top of the suet cage, reaching down for a snack.
I don’t think I’d seen this species at our feeder before. Certainly not recently, which suggests it’s migratory and has just returned to the mid-Atlantic area.
I believe that is a mockingbird, Mama Zappa!
Okay, this seems like a good thread for a nerdy confession. I replaced all of my ringtones with bird calls. (Less annoying in public than say “Fergalicious”) But not just any bird calls- calls that were recorded close by my locale. Cause the tufted titmouse recorded in Maine or Florida sounds nothing like the avian dialect in my backyard. So I spent hours surfing Cornell, eNature, Audobon, etc until I found recordings of cardinals, song sparrows, blue jays, flickers, bluebirds, etc that sound like my guys. Each friend and family member has their own unique bird call. And for everybody else? Mockingbird- natch. And my text message indicator is a recording of spring peepers.
So when my phone rings in the doctor’s office or grocery store, everyone just looks a little confused but also mildly happy.
Coo-wul!! 
Thanks - I’d have never guessed what that was.
Well, until it started chasing after the diamond rings and wine bottles 
Cool! My friend got this book for Christmas–it’s really neat.
Woohoo - my grackles are back! They’re pretty neat looking - “black” all over but if the light hits them right, iridescent purple around the head.
And I had a funny experience just now.
We recently bought one of these, the recycled plastic pileated suet feeders) . I hung it on the same tree branch as the old cheapo single-cake cage feeder - but a bit lower. The birds were using the support for the new feeder to perch on to reach the old one.
The old one is now empty while the new one is untouched. Just now, I saw a starling standing on the top of the woodpecker feeder, announcing his opinion of my hospitality to the whole neighborhood:
CHEAP!
Then he figured out how to get to the side of the woodpecker feeder and he shut up.