Life and Wildlife along the Little Buffalo River

I ran head-on into a busy male Pileated Woodpecker yesterday morning and ended up taking a great series of 221 shots of our largest woodpecker (although there my be an Ivory Bill Woodpecker lurking in eastern Arkansas). He was so busy looking for ants and termites that he did not notice me. I had my Canon 7D with a Canon 400L f/4.0 DO IS Lens and sat down to watch. On my 7D with a 1.6 crop factor the pictures are equivalent to that of a 640mm lens on a Full Frame camera. I would say I was within 50 feet of him working. He an the Ms. are still feeding the fledglings, which by now are quite large (almost adult size).

Here are three of the 221 pictures:

Pileated 1

Pileated 2

Pileated 3