I had grand plans for a long entry tonight, on one of three subjects I have percolating in the brewer. However, none of the three happened, for various reasons. One was that I decided, on a whim, to make chicken pot pie for dinner tonight. Of course, anything that requires a crust is a bit time-consuming, so that took up more time than planned, which then ran into the other little tasks. So a short one tonight.
This afternoon there was a lot of activity at the feeders and in the surrounding yard. We’ve had a few more birds coming to the feeders, new species for that list though we’ve seen them in the area. The first new species was Dark-eyed Junco, which was visiting some seed spilled on the driveway, but either hadn’t discovered, or preferred not to visit, the platform feeder. The second was a Downy Woodpecker that came and checked out the peanut feeder.
And the third one was this Hairy Woodpecker pair, a male and a female. Whether or not they were a bonded pair or it was just serendipitous that they were different sexes I don’t know. The female quickly discovered my suet feeder and would come back to that, but the male stuck to the platform feeder, perhaps not having noticed the suet yet. At the platform he had to contend with the Blue Jays, however. He’d duck down around the rim of the platform when the jays got pushy, which I caught in the above shot.
Before the female found the suet, I watched her climb up the wooden pole the platform is mounted on and then hang from its underside. The platform has holes drilled in it to allow moisture out, and she was reaching up through these holes to grab the seed. That’s one way to avoid the jays!
seabrookeleckie.com 
I like the running feet of the landing jay in the first photo. The female hairy was pretty clever to avoid the big blues!
You probably know this already, and I read it in either Tim Flannery’s “Eternal Frontier” (and ecologic history of North America) or in one of Jared Diamond’s books: all woodpeckers evolved from a common ancestor, as opposed to convergent evolution from a number of bird species. That being said, I’ve never heard of that type of woodpecker … it vaguely resembles our red cockaded woodpeckers here in south Florida.