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  • Felicity Shouldersfaerye
    May 1, 2026, 4:46 AM

    Big news! Did you know that juvenile hairy woodpeckers sometimes -- "infrequently" — have yellow crowns instead of red? Well, if a person stalking a woodpecker family were lucky enough to see one of these yellow-crowned babies, she'd be able to differentiate it from the red-crowned one and know there were at least two kids in the nest! 🥹

    A little bitty woodpecker head sticking well out from a nest hole in a barkless conifer snag: the head is far enough out to cast a nice shadow in the sunlight. The beak is facing down, so we see the top of the head very clearly: black between the pale eyebrow stripes, with the crown marked with a light brushing of yellow. One might even say two light brushings of yellow, because there is a clear break between them, as if they were applied with two separate paint-covered fingers on the little head.
    The same nest hole on the same sunny day, but with another little head sticking out. It is in a similar pose, but we see the crown marked with a single continuous area of red feathers, instead of the unusual yellow. This is the much more usual color scheme for a hairy woodpecker hatchling, and looks more like the hatchling I managed to peek at a few days ago!
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