This is not a picture of the pair of pileated woodpeckers that graced our feeder and a nearby tree this Hearts Day, but it does show you a female (on the left) and a male. The male, if you can see well enough, has a red bar on the stripe running from his beak under his eye. The female has a similar bar but without the red. When we saw ours today, the female was at the suet box on the bird feeder and the male was on the birch tree beside it. Wish we had a photo of that, but they fly away when they detect movement through our windows. And pictures through the windows and screens don't turn out all that well anyway.
This is the first time we have seen them together this winter. A few years back there were three in the backyard at one time, two males and a female. One of the males and the female were doing a courtship dance, and I assume the onlooker was a rival.
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