Now appearing at a bird feeder near you: the hairy woodpecker. It’s common, it’s cool, and it’s often misidentified because it looks so much like its smaller distant cousin, the downy woodpecker.

I scattered a few peanuts on the picnic table on our deck, and it did not take long before half a dozen species were lining up for a freebie. One of those species was a hairy woodpecker, a favorite of ...

Claim to fame: Perhaps the hairy woodpecker’s main claim to fame is that it is the bird most commonly misidentified as its smaller and more abundant cousin; the downy woodpecker. Hairy woodpeckers, as ...

Nowhere else in North America are there more species of woodpeckers than along the nearby east slopes of the Cascade Mountains to the west of Yakima. An impressive 12 resident species, with an ...

The night was clear, calm and bright. The waxing gibbous moon reflects off the snow that fell yesterday before the skies cleared and the temperature dropped. It was about 15 degrees below zero at dusk ...

A woodpecker frequently visits our feeder, alighting on the wooden supporting post and hopping up the post to the suet. Its medium size and striking markings — black wings spotted with white, a large ...

A male hairy woodpecker is a regular visitor to my peanut butter feeders, also sampling from the suet from time to time. In a previous year, a male brought a juvenile with him almost every day — ...

This story was originally published in April 2017. Today we learn how to speak woodpecker. At least five different species are cavorting somewhere near your house right this minute. There are three ...

Gardeners and homeowners will appreciate this one of our woodpecker facts. Don’t worry about these birds damaging your trees. The birds prefer dead or dying trees because the trees are insect magnets.

There have been many astonishingly fast drummers. Legendary jazzman Buddy Rich comes to mind, as does Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham. Probably even faster is metal band Dream Theater’s drummer, Mike ...

Just a few minutes up the trail after seeing the hairy woodpecker, we again heard a tapping noise through the fog and sleet. Like déjà vu, a black-and-white checkered woodpecker clung to a birch tree, ...

On Wednesday morning, I woke up to 8 inches of snow and a population of woodpeckers at my backyard feeders that had exploded. By Friday, the temperature dropped to a minus 2 degrees Fahrenheit, ...