Juvenile Hairy Woodpecker
Or is it a Downy? The beak is neither long enough nor short enough for me to tell.
On the way up to the deck, I saw that there was a woodpecker scratching his beak on the wooden post. I only had my 50mm lens on the camera, and I was about 100’ feet away, but I grabbed a snap (see below). I knew the bird would be tiny, but at least I had one in the can.
I proceeded to walk toward the bird taking lots and lots of shots, not knowing when he might fly away.
He didn’t fly away. When I lowered the camera, we were eye to eye—which is why I think it is likely a juvenile, not yet afraid of we humans.
We stared a bit, and when I lifted the camera up again, he finally flew off.
All that said, the camera was not set correctly to take those shots, so the focus was all over the place, and the lens was set to f/1.2, so the depth of focus was really small. I noticed that the bird was pretty still for some sequences, so I used Affinity Photo to do a focus merge — the bits of focus were combined together to make the sharp photo above.
I’ve never run into something like that before. The woodpeckers will occasionally tolerate me if they are hungry, but never as close as I got today. It was fun to look up and be almost nose-to-beak with this one.