The head is red; the belly is on the pale side. But despite the obvious, this is the red-bellied woodpecker, Melanerpes carolinus, not the red-headed woodpecker.

The red-bellied is, by our observations, the most common of the woodpeckers likely to be seen in South Florida. It roams pretty much anywhere there are trees, in the woods and in the 'burbs. You might come across one in your backyard.

The red-bellied is found throughout much of the eastern United States as far north as Minnesota and New England and as far west as Texas and Nebraska. It does not migrate anywhere in its range. It has the same combination of reds, blacks and whites that most other North American woodpeckers have. What differentiates the red-bellied from the red-headed are two obvious features. The head on the red-headed is completely red, face and all, and the back is completely black. The face of a red-bellied is mostly white with only a hint of red, and its back has black-and-white stripes. The red-headed, by the way, is the only member of the woodpecker family with a completely red head.

Back to our guy, the red-bellied. It's a medium-sized woodpecker, with a body length of about nine inches and a wingspan of less than 18 inches. It has a fairly long and stout bill and a slightly red tinge to an otherwise pale underside.

Dinner for the red-bellied includes insects and spiders, nuts, seeds and various fruits and occassionally small fish and nestling birds. They can be acrobats of sorts, manuevering, up, down and around, even upside down as they hunt for food.The bird in the photos above and to the left was eating the fruit of a strangler fig. Red-bellied are more likely to pick through the surface of a tree in search of food than to pound a hole in one.