To Be Or Not To Be A Woodpecker - Speckled Piculet

Uttarakhand, Somewhere on the Highway

We spotted this guy on the side of the road. He was in the trees below us and in 15 minutes, he broke my arm and back. Not really, both were just sore from moving the camera around to so many spots, chasing him.

Everything I typed about in “Woh Time Nahi Dengi” held true to this guy and some more. My guy here, was an expert in changing locations and every time I thought that he was gone, he’d fly back and “tsk tsk” at me. So I danced his dance. It helped that he was in the trees in the gorge cause he was high up in it, it didn’t help cause I couldn’t move around with the road going one way.

One clear look at him and I knew I wanted lots of pictures of him. Look at that smiley face. The problem here was foliage as you can see in some of the pictures. There was no getting around that. As I tried to get some clear photos, I heard how he was the smallest woodpecker in Asia, a piculet, the speckled kind. So, it turns out that my guy is a “kind” or woodpecker. He doesn’t have the stiff hair that woodpeckers have but in all other ways acts and behaves like a woodpecker. Oh and he’s small. The brown capped pigmy woodpecker is the smallest woodpecker in India. My guy is way smaller. Apparently there are three kinds of piculet found in Asia. So technically he is a woodpecker but technically he isn’t. To Be or not to be?

I loved my interaction with this bird. He was obviously playing with me. Every time that I turned my camera away, thinking he was gone, he would fly right back into my field of vision. He’d hop around, fly to a nearby branch, fly off and repeat. He gave me the longest sighting of all the little birds I saw on that trip but the least number of clear pictures in ratio given the amount of time we were at it.

I need to find more piculets. These guys are fun.