Huge, clown-like woodpecker videotaped

Nine paces from my office window, there is a large, dead tree with a roost hole sometimes used by Pileated Woodpeckers. Earlier this week, I saw a Pileated Woodpecker on that tree. At my leisure, I took out my Canon Mini-DV video camera and shot some handheld video through a none-too-clean window.

Not knowing an easy way to transfer this video to my Mac, I displayed it on my TV screen, took some digital photos with another camera, then uploaded these photos to photobucket.com. Here are two: Pileated 1; Pileated 2.

Obviously, these are not high quality pictures; however, they are orders of magnitude better than the Luneau video. These are the type of pictures that can be easily captured by any of the millions of "Joe Blows" armed with inexpensive digital cameras these days.

Some points about this bird:

--the bird did not disappear like a will-o'-the-wisp when I pulled out the camera. It hung around! Note that Tanner said the Ivory-bill in his experience was "certainly not noticeably more wary and wild than the Pileated Woodpecker. "

--it did indeed look huge. Expecting observers to use size to distinguish a lone "huge" bird from another that's an inch or two "huger" is asking too much. It's also too much to expect someone to distinguish a Greater Yellowlegs from a Lesser Yellowlegs based solely on size, given a lone bird without anything else available for size comparison.

--the bird did indeed move in a herky-jerky fashion, and its face could be described as "clown-like"

--the bill looked long, but it didn't look ivory in color.

--the bird eventually flew rapidly away, flying in a straight line with no apparent undulation

--as the bird flew away, I heard no loud wooden wing sound.

--those wings were flapping very quickly. I could see flashing black and white, but there is no way that I could reliably tell you exactly where the white was positioned, or whether the white was symmetrically placed on both wings.

--although the bird was little more than 30 feet away when it flew, and although it was sunny, I absolutely could not see "light shining off veins in the primary feathers".