Does anybody here know much about Utah birds? We have a couple of woodpeckers on our street, and I find them totally charming and fun to watch. I can’t get close enough to them to get a good picture. Here’s a still from a video I snapped of one of them. He/it is not very big, maybe a little bigger than a sparrow and an inch or two smaller than a robin. The photo is awful — but you can see he has a white chest. I need to get a better shot, but based on what I’ve been able to see online about Utah woodpeckers, I think it looks like this is a Downy woodpecker, which according to my superficial study is the most common type in northern Utah. Anybody here have any ideas or suggestions?
Correct. It’s a Downy. We have at least one that loves the power poles on our street. A couple of years ago we had two of them hanging around under our deck and bird feeder.
The National Geographic Birds of the Western US is a great reference book we use to identify birds. Very good maps to show what birds come through Utah as well as illustrations, size info, and call information.
When the red hot pokers bloom we get Scott’s orioles in our yard. They’re really shy, so if you see them you have to move slowly, but they are a spectacular bird.
We also have three red tail hawks that live in a nest about half a block away and we see them all the time. We see bald eagles in the winter sometimes. Not bad for dead center of the SL Valley.
Our neighborhood got “infested” recently with woodpeckers. I haven’t heard what breed, but I definitely have been hearing their pecking. By the sounds, there has to be at least a half a dozen adult birds.
