This flicker is ill-lit, but has that fluffy, shinynew look to his chest feathers that makes me suspect he’s newly fledged.
I found him or her in this weird little no-humans-land on Woodland and 2nd Avenue. There’s a plot of land there, owned but little-used by the gas company. It borders the gardens of a couple of apartment towers and is fringed by tallish pine trees, some living and some half or fully dead–I assume, from their slo-mo death throes, because of Mountain Pine Beetles. The mix–live tree, dead tree, in-between tree–makes a perfect combo habitat for Stellar’s Jay, eight billion types of sparrow, bushtits, starlings and the occasional flicker. The jays come in the spring, disappear, and then come back in late summer and fall. We assume they’re nesting somewhere in the meantime… maybe Central Park? Anyway, they have been gone since about May but they’re back; I have been hearing them since the same morning that this flicker turned up.
