Living in the Pacific Northwest we have a lot of great local parks for birding. For us in Edmonds Yost park is excellent year round and is great for a lunch time walk. It is also known for it’s pair of Barred Owls that live there and are seen or heard regularly. We have taken some pictures of them before but will do another post with them later as this day we did not come across them.
What we did come across was one of our more common woodpeckers in the PNW, the Pileated Woodpecker. This is one of my favorite local birds, I think of them as our local tropical bird because of their size, color, and their very loud clear calls that remind me of colorful birds from the tropics. This one was working on a nice dead tree or ‘snag’ for you forest folks. The woodpecker was not very concerned with us and let us get some nice pictures. So what does pileated mean? Pileated means it has a crest on its head or ‘pileum’, in this case referring to the nice red mohawk these birds sport.
In summer time look for snags in the forest with holes in them, you maybe lucky enough to spot a pileated woodpecker nest and even see the nestlings being fed. We found a few of these last summer and will post again this summer if we spot one. Of course if you do spot one please keep your distance, the Pileated Woodpecker’s are territorial and of course we like them and don’t want to spook them or their babies!
So although we did not find the owls we did get a nice picture of the Pileated Woodpecker and we also managed to spot some smaller birds. We have found it hard to spot and even harder to shoot warblers and kinglets which are some of the more colorful little birds in the PNW. Using the Merlin app (will talk more about birding apps in a future post) we were able to use the sound ID featured to locate some Ruby and Golden-crowned Kinglets. These little guys don’t like to sit still and pose for pictures. We were lucky enough to get one pretty good shot for the gallery below of a Golden-crowned Kinglet.
Things to note:
- Yost park has multiple walking trails and a nice little creek running through the middle – great just to get out for a walk though some trails are a bit steep
- In summer time it may get busy with the tennis/pickle ball courts and public pool making it tough for parking
- Please check out our resources page to learn more about the camera we used to take these shots!
