Sunday, December 3, 2017

A California Endemic, A Nuttall's Woodpecker on the Tuolumne Parkway

Sometimes I am just being a snot, by posting pictures of birds that no one outside of California can see unless they come here. There aren't that many birds that are endemic just to California, really just two (the Yellow-billed Magpie, and the Channel Islands Scrub Jay), but the Nuttall's Woodpecker (Picoides nuttallii) is one as well, as long as we count the northern end of Baja California as part of California (and why not?). There is a single record of one in Oregon.

This one was on the Tuolumne River the other day in its characteristic habitat of an oak woodland. Although they live almost exclusively among the oaks, they don't consume acorns. They mostly eat insects that they dig out of the bark, and occasionally they will eat native berries, like elderberries or poison oak.

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