The woodpecker doesn’t share. He will see off even the jackdaws with a well-aimed jab. Mid-afternoon and he is monopolising the cone-shaped peanut feeder, clinging to the wire half-way up, thin black beak hammering into the packed nuts. He’s a great spotted woodpecker, a mixture of intense focus and suspicious caution, so that he often breaks off his feeding to hang motionless for a few seconds.
I was wondering what it was that he reminded me of when the hammering stopped and a red-topped head and a gimlet eye swivelled in my direction. As I stood stock-still in the kitchen, his head snapped back front again and it came to me that he resembled nothing so much as a nineteenth-century English redcoat wielding a steel bayonet, with a red hackle on his headgear, white facings on his coat and that very particular shade of red on his belly.
And then he had enough and was away in a swooping flight over the empty school buildings.
thekitchensinkbirdwatcher 