An unexpected view of a first flight of a Juvenile Pileated Woodpecker!!!

I must first thank Denise Randall for her article of  August 15th  on “Town Hall Butterflies” and Jessica Pennell for her picture of the butterflies.    After reading this article, I was interested in finding out the type of butterflies that have been hanging around my gardens.   Mainly because all of the sudden I am starting to hear about them and I had taken for granted the ones that I have watched all summer.  

I do not have any special butterfly bushes but I do have wild flowers.    I decided this past Sunday to take a closer look at the shape of the pair of butterflies that have been hanging around, and they definitely look like the picture (yellow with black markings),  I also saw a pair that was all black with white markings.    What I did notice was that the black pair seemed a little territorial.    The single black butterfly was nectaring going from flower to flower for at least 10 minutes, then the other pair came by to nectar but the single butterfly flew towards it and forced it away from the flowers; it was really neat to see.  

This was about 10:00 Sunday morning, within a few minutes of watching the butterflies, I heard some bird calling and then a few loud screeches, I looked up and saw two beautiful Pileated Woodpeckers flying towards a thin tree and landed amongst the leaves.    There was a lot of commotion; I can see one of them on one branch and the other on the branch below.    I couldn’t see what was going, but there was lots of movement on the branch below.   Because of the way the pair was acting up and moving from branch to branch and flying around, I thought maybe they are mating, but it did not make sense so late in the summer.   I knew they were Pileated Woodpeckers and for them to be hanging on a thin tree with lots of leaves did not make sense either.    They finally flew away and I heard the screeches again but did not see the pair come back to this tree.   

We had gone out and came back around 6:00 p.m.     Once again I heard the call and loud screeches, again the two birds land on this tree and flew out quickly, but this time to our surprise we see what the commotion is all about,  we see a Juvenile on the lower branch unsure of what to do, flapping its wings going from one end of the branch to another, then hanging on a lower branch,  this goes for about 2 minutes and both Ed and I are like,  I bet this Juvenile is learning to fly, then it happened, the Juvenile dropped and started to fly, it was beautiful and was an awesome moment.   It flew directly towards its parents which were anxiously waiting in the woods.    The screeches were gone and a different call was heard, something of a happy call, for the next 20 minutes once in a while we would hear pecking, Juvenile was learning to survive.

If it wasn’t for the article on the butterflies, we would not have experience such a beautiful moment.    I did go online and learn more about the calling of the Juvenile and I found the following website, there are 7 different calls the Pileated Woodpecker makes, the “Wuk” series calls and various calls by Juvenile” is the one we heard.   Enjoy.

http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/pileated_woodpecker/sounds