Hairy Woodpecker?

You know me. I can take or leave birds. Yes, they are all around us up here on the Mendocino Coast, and many of them are very colorful as well as chatty and charming.

Chunk and Punk have to keep good relations up with the local birds since they share breakfast with them every morning outside the Inn's farmhouse.

Heidi, on the other hand, is bird-mad. She says we have species of birds all around us they don't have any place else and she is nutty for birdwatching. When she read on this blog that someone had sighted what is apparently a very rare or maybe unique HAIRY WOODPECKER, she went nuts.

You can read all about it here:

http://www.fortbragg.com/blog/2010/12/possible-local-race-of-hairy-woodpecker/


And here's the photo of the little guy (or girl -- who can say?):

Photo by Ron LaValley

I promised her I'd send out the alert and now I have! Heidi's friends at the Mendocino Coast Audubon Society are  looking into it, to see if it is in fact a brand new Mendocino-only kind of bird.

The chipmunks just hope it won't be showing up for breakfast any time soon! I told them not to worry. What with all of the State Parks we have locally (the most of any county in the US), plus that awesome Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens, and even an Audubon-approved golf course near by, they've got no reason to show up for breakfast -- delightful though our Inn breakfast is.