Northern Flickers come in two flavors — yellow-shafted and red-shafted. The latter most often are seen west of the Great Plains. Here, we would expect to see yellow-shafted birds, like the one shown in the first two photos. It was in our backyard a couple of days ago, taking advantage of sunshine to do some grooming. The wing-feather shafts are yellow, as are the interior feathers of the wing. Tail feather shafts and the underside of the tail feathers also show yellow. You can see that in the photo taken last spring of three flickers engaged in some courtship action. The black mustache mark indicates a male bird.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 18th, 2009 at 12:41 pm and is filed under Backyard birding, Bird biology, Bird identification. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.