Winter Birds - Three Toed Woodpecker

Detail below..

“ Male Northern Three-Toed Woodpeckers and their young sport a yellow patch of feathers on their foreheads. The Athabaskan Indians had a legend about how this quet dweller of the Nothern spruce forest got its yellow crown. They believe the male woodpecker devoured his mate in time of famine and wiped his claws on the top of his head. Th yellow feathers they believed to be a mark of fat which remains to this day. ”

An excerpt from Bill Kitzmiller's Kachemak Wilderness Notes.