As if my love of the Driftless Area isn’t obvious from my site or my books, I’ve decided to create a series of posts to highlight my little corner of Wisconsin. I’m calling it #DriftlessThursday. All pictures on Driftless Thursdays are my own and you may use them at will as long as you mention they came from CastenHouseBooks.com. Perhaps a few more people will find the site and fall in love with the Driftless Area as well. It’s a great setting for stories and a beautiful place to live.

I decided to start with some birds because we just took this picture last night:

Taken at dusk, this is a barred owl. Our cat, Jenga, alerted us to its presence in the tree right outside our bedroom window. We hear them often, their call is said to sound like “Who cooks for you???” But this is our first owl picture in five years of living in the Driftless Area.

Birds of prey are not something I saw a lot of when we lived in the Chicago suburbs. It’s a real treat to see them so often here, so here are a couple more:

Of course, the bald eagle is instantly recognizable. I still can’t tell the difference between a sharp-shinned hawk and a Cooper’s hawk though.

If there’s another type of bird I rarely saw before moving here, it’s woodpeckers. There are so many. I’ll cover the ones that visit our bird feeders daily in a future post, but two of the rarer ones to see NOT at the bird feeders are pileated woodpeckers and northern flickers.

The pileated woodpecker picture is one-of-a-kind for us. We hear them often but rarely see them. The calls of these two birds are kind of similar. Both kind of cackle or laugh like a monkey, but the pileated is much louder and more dynamic about it. The northern flicker is notable as the only woodpecker that frequently feeds on the ground. If they find an ant mound, they are in heaven.

It’s hard not to become a birdwatcher when you move to the Driftless Area, in my opinion. I’ll end this post with a book recommendation. Not my own, but a great bird identification field guide series by Stan Tekiela (Amazon series page linked, not an affiliate link, just a heartfelt recommendation). I used the Wisconsin version almost daily in our first year here.