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Our region’s biggest woodpecker is a tough, crow-sized bird that sends wood chips flying as it carves gaping holes in tree trunks. Yet it was always afraid of people.

Ottawa naturalist Dan Brunton remembers finding one 80 kilometres north of the capital some 50 years ago. It was noteworthy enough to make the newspaper’s bird column.

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Pioneer naturalist Elkanah Billings wrote of seeing “a flock of seven or eight in the unsurveyed lands between Ottawa and Georgian Bay” (probably present-day Algonquin Park) in 1852 as an exceptional occurrence. In 1923 it was still described as “a rare resident in the immediate vicinity of the city (Ottawa).” People shot them.

“There were real concerns that this thing was going extinct because the big pines are coming down,” Brunton said.

All that has changed radically in recent years.

“Now they’re nesting in the Glebe.”

The pileated is instantly recognizable from its smaller cousins, the downy and hairy woodpeckers. The little ones make a sharp tapping noise in trees. The pileated uses its beak like an axe, chopping deep into tree trunks in search of carpenter ants and other bugs.