Knock, Knock

Yesterday while walking we saw one of our favorite birds, a Woodpecker, a Pileated Woodpecker to be precise.  They're huge, up to 17 inches tall, and the one we saw was near that size, and he was pecking away so loudly.  If I beat my head like that, and I'm so stubborn I often beat my head, I'd have the headache from h**l.
So when we got home I looked the Woodpecker up in Wikipedia to find out how he does it, and it said that their brain is smaller than other birds and their skull is thicker.  The brain fits snugly up against the skull so there's no room for it to rattle around, I've often felt that my brain rattling around was one of my problems, but I'm not sure I want a smaller brainer and thicker skull to take care of that problem.
We usually see these birds in pairs and so we always call them Heckle and Jeckle after the old cartoon woodpeckers.  There are so many trees in our neighborhood and most of them bug infested that the woodpeckers could live here  and eat happily for years.

As we continued our walk we came to a large tree that had fallen down several months ago, and it had lines of holes girding it.  Mac said that was woodpecker work.  Nice to know we're giving birds a job.