Laura Erickson’s For the Birds

This beautiful, oddly brown woodpecker is native to Mexico’s Sierra Madre Occidental, making it barely into southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico, where it’s found in mountainous pine-oak forests at between about 5,000 and 5,600 feet in elevation. It was formerly considered a subspecies of Strickland’s Woodpecker, but the species was split in 2000, the northern population getting this new name.

Like many birds, Arizona Woodpeckers are easiest to find during the breeding season when males and females are most vocal, between late March and May, but I saw and photographed them in November 2013 during my Big Year and in August 2019 during the Southeastern Arizona Birding Festival.