Pileated Woodpecker !

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My colleague and friend, Rich, is learning to be a better digiscoper this week while we work the Space Coast Birding Festival. We went out to Merritt Island NWR yesterday while waiting for the exhibit hall to open and stopped, on a whim, at the Hammock trails. I didn’t have much hope of seeing many birds, but I wanted to get out of the car and walk. We did catch fleeting glimpses of a Pileated Woodpecker, always a treat as they tend to be shy birds. We have them in Maine, a few, but the only ones I have ever been able to photograph have been in Florida. After our encounter, I was telling Rich how difficult they are to photograph in general, and especially how hard to digiscope. “They just do not sit still long enough. You never get a good shot of them.”

Of course, about then we walked up to two other hikers who pointed out a Pileated working some dead trees about 100 feet back into the forest from the trail. They had been watching it long enough, so they passed it on to us. And of course, it made a liar out of me. It worked a small section of tree trunks for 20 minutes as we watched and photographed. Rich even got the scope on it and got some digiscoped shots. It was in fairly dense cover, so the shots are not great…but, hey, it is a Pileated Woodpecker!

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These shots are with the Canon SX50HS, and as you can see, they preset a tricky auto focus problem, which the Canon handled very well. Processed in Snapseed on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014.

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Which just goes to show you: never say never.

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