How to Know the Birds: No. 18, Flickers in the Flick of a Tongue

At my daughter’s soccer practice the other day, I saw an adult male Red-shafted Flicker. Pretty typical for this kind of woodpecker—feeding on the ground. Hm. If you calculated a time budget for the bird, I’m pretty sure you’d find that it spends more time feeding on lawns and in meadows than pecking on limbs and boughs.