I know, I just showed you a picture of a Pileated Woodpecker a few days ago. Well, this one was made yesterday evening from our front porch. This male Pileated Woodpecker was about to fly over to a dead oak tree trunk only a few feet away. He has hammered quite a few holes into this tree already. The old oak was about to die three years ago. It lost most of its leaves and there was an imminent danger that it would fall onto the house during a storm. We had to make a decision. Instead of cutting down the whole tree we ask a tree expert to cut off only all the branches. Well, we have a dead big oak tree trunk standing at the edge of the woods in our front yard and some neighbors may think we are a little coo-coo, but we are very proud of it! It became a shelter for the squirrels at times, and at least six of the seven woodpecker species we have here have been seen on that tree. The Pileated Woodpecker is a permanent resident in the woods on our bluffs and down in the Little Maquoketa River Valley. We hear them all the time, especially in spring, but seeing them and making a photo is a different story. They do not come to the suet feeders, as other woodpeckers do and any sighting is an event, at least for us. Today’s photo is my proof that having a dead oak tree trunk in the front yard can be useful, even if some landscape designers may not agree, and some neighbors may turn up their nose 😉. I think you get my line of thoughts, creating habitats for our wildlife, even if they are tiny, can be very important at times when habitat loss is still prevailing, due to a life style in our society where economical expansion has most of the time the priority over everything else.