Woodpecker X

Shot some stills of a Hairy Woodpecker yesterday, in the Red Maple on my front lawn...

Or, I suppose, it might have been a Downy Woodpecker...

Or, I suppose, it might have been a squirrel.

Thank you, Samuel Marchbanks. Yes, I have a degree in Biology, and yes, I've always kinda sucked at identifying birds. I've always felt this combination of admiration and loathing for those oh-so-confident types in MEC gear who can take one look at a tiny, three-pixel blur in a viewfinder and say with absolute certainty, oh, my, what a lovely specimen of Corvus frugilegus... why, yes, of course I'm sure... look... see... the feathers on the face?

To which I reply: 'And... which end's the face?'

Okay. Uncalled for. And I actually kinda like crows and their cousins. Shame on me. But seriously, yeah, I'm not good with birds. A bit better with trees, but then, trees are (i) larger than birds, and (ii) don't move, all of which helps a bit.

I wonder, now and then, if my real problem with this has something to do with my very strict and touchy attitude about certainty. That's to say: I'm one of those people who's always tried to stay very much in touch with what he doesn't know, and how well he knows what he thinks he does. I mean, sure, I'm pretty sure about a lot of things, but it's also my nature, when I'm not quite sure, to say so, and to be as precise or as vague as is reasonable given my perception of that reality. So if I'm looking at what I think might be a rook... and I'm not quite sure it's a rook, I don't say, oh, look! A rook! (even to compose an homage to Dr. Seuess). Rather, I say, oh, look, a bird... which might be a rook... or a raven... or, hell, it's only three pixels... maybe it's not a bird; it could just as well be a wombat, for all I know.

There's probably something in this, here, that also sheds light on my intense hostility to the Brylcreemed undead horrors that shill for the various flavours of fundamentalism (and my slightly less intense hostility to slightly less fundamentalist varieties of obscurantism)--insofar as there, really, is the near ultimate in declaring certainty when it's so unwarranted (or so, for that matter, utterly contradicted) given the evidence... but I guess that's probably a larger discussion.

Anyway, getting back to the birds, it seems to me so much undue certainty (and the corresponding arguments, and birders are a scream to watch when they get in a fight over something--'Hairy!' ... 'Downy!' ... 'Hairy!' ... 'Downy!' ... 'Is too!' ... 'Is not!' ... 'That's it! I'm taking my spotting scope and going home'...) if they'd just get used to using higher taxons. I mean, sure, I can at least probably declare, proudly, about said rook (or raven), 'Look! A Corvid'. And I'd think that should count for something.

Or, at worst, I could say, 'Look! A chordate!'.

I think.

Anyway. The photos in this article are of said Picoide. And my daughter thought, whatever he was (it was a he, this much we could tell, whether pubescens or villosus) quite pretty.