Female Pileated Woodpecker

My husband and I are bird lovers, which means that we are ever watchful for the flutter of wings. We live on one rural acre in the country, in central Pennsylvania, and occasionally, very large birds move through our woods. This is one of the biggest I've seen lately: a female pileated woodpecker who is one of our visitors.

To watch this creature move through the woods, hopping from tree to tree, and scampering up each one, is a marvel. It is a dark bird, and it makes me think somehow of Darth Vader, but not because it is evil; just that it is large, and dark.

According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, male pileated woodpeckers have an entirely red crest on the head, while the female crest is dark in front. The male also has a red whisker stripe on its face. And so I deduce this one - which lacks the full red crest and whisker stripe - to be a female!

The sounds made by the pileated woodpecker are very wild and strange. In fact, its cry is more like that of a simian than that of a bird. If you walk into your backyard and hear its cry echoing through the woods, you may just guess that you are in a tropical forest, listening to monkeys.

The tune . . . You'll have to humor me on the song. I picked the song for this huge bird before I investigated further and discovered that this is actually a FEMALE. The song is Big Daddy of Them All, one of my favorite John Mellencamp tunes, and the title track from the album Big Daddy, which is just a winner all around.

According to Wikipedia, the song "is the account of a parental authority figure whose selfish womanizing ways have led to his downfall." And it is an autobiographical song about Mellencamp himself. The "Big Daddy" name was derived from a character in the Tennessee Williams classic, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, one of Mellencamp's favorite plays.