As we walked into the woods at the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, we heard a commotion. It was an early spring territorial battle between a pair of red-bellied woodpeckers (Picus ventre rubro) and a pair of northern cardinals (Cardinalis cardinalis). Figure 1 shows the female, holding her ground in a warm morning light. In my experience red-bellies are skitterish. They never stay long and, if what you want is a photograph without a feeder, “a natural photograph,” hard to capture. I was delighted by the delicate dried fiddle head ferns on the tree limb to the right.

Canon T2i with EF 100-400, F/4.5-5.6 L IS USM lens at 220 mm, ISO 400, Aperture Priority AE Mode 1/100th sec at f/6.3 with no exposure compensation.