yellow-shafted flicker | Birds of New England.com

Photo by Chris Bosak – A northern flicker (yellow-shafted flicker) preens in New England.

Some bird names are spot on. Yellow-rumped warblers have yellow rumps as an obvious field mark. Mourning doves have a mournful-sounding call. Bluebirds are, well, blue birds.

Some bird names do not seem to make sense. A red belly is hardly a red-bellied woodpecker’s most distinctive field mark. Yes, their bellies are red and yes, the name red-headed woodpecker is already taken by a more deserving species, but still. American robins are actually thrushes, and most warblers do not warble.

Then there are bird names that make sense only after looking up the meaning of a few words. Semipalmated plovers and semipalmated sandpipers are so named because there is partial webbing between their toes. The zoological definition of palmated, according to dictionary.com, is “web-footed.” I was several years into my birding hobby before I learned this. I don’t think I gave it a second thought before I heard it for the first time. I just accepted that as the name and moved on.

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I posted last week about seeing a family of pileated woodpeckers looking for insects in my backyard. Also last week, I had a chance encounter with another one of my favorite woodpecker species: the northern flicker.

I was drawn to the backyard as I heard a flicker noisily issuing its alarm call over and over. It turns out, a cat was walking through the yard and several birds were scolding the feline. The flicker, however, was by far the loudest and most agitated. There were most likely young flickers around but I didn’t see them.

Flickers are handsome birds with an interesting assortment of colors and decorations. Note the bib under the neck and spots on the chest and belly. The bird shown in the photographs is a female. Males have a black “mustache.”

The northern flicker is made up of two subspecies: yellow-shafted flicker and red-shafted flicker, which were once considered two separate species. Here in New England, we have the yellow-shafted variety. The name comes from the yellow feathers on the underside of the tail and wings.