Just for new subscribers, I'll reiterate. The two flickers I have coming
to my suet feeder include a male with red wings/tail but a black malar
stripe and red nape patch; head color otherwise like red-shafted; and a
female with a typical red-shafted head (brown/gray, no nape patch) but with
yellow wings and tail! I have the feeling that these intermediates are
more common than when I arrived here a quarter-century ago, but I don't
know if we'll ever be able to document that. We get a lot of dead flickers
donated to the museum, and I'm afraid we're biasing the sample by saving
all the variants but not all the typical red-shafteds as skins.
Interestingly, although many of the birds that we receive show
intermediacy, we haven't got a pure yellow-shafted out of the 25 saved and
10-15 flickers discarded since I've been here, so I would say they are
truly uncommon. I've seen them mostly on the outer coast, where I really
do think they are more common, perhaps comparable to the distribution of
(Myrtle) Yellow-rumped Warblers in winter, as the flickers are probably
coming from Alaska too.

Russell, how many reports of "pure" yellow-shafted do you receive for the
Field Notes?

Dennis Paulson, Director phone: (206) 756-3798
Slater Museum of Natural History fax: (206) 756-3352
University of Puget Sound e-mail: dpaulson at ups.edu
Tacoma, WA 98416