Cooper River Assisted Living

03/19/2026

We welcomed the young ladies from the O’Keefe Irish Step Dance Group today & they were wonderful

03/19/2026

03/18/2026

Matilda getting a photo op with a very handsome piper

03/18/2026

03/18/2026

We are getting ready to welcome Jack and his bagpipe and have a little bit of St. Patrick’s Day shenanigans

03/18/2026

On our scenic route through I’On we even found Matilda a boyfriend.

03/18/2026

Then Cindy made us shamrock shakes in honor of St. Patrick’s Day. They were yummy.

03/18/2026

Happy St. Patrick’s Day was started off with the men’s breakfast.

03/14/2026

Mr James has taken up bird watching that sounds like fun.

You see my head — blazing red from the nape to the forehead — and you say oh look, a Red-headed Woodpecker.

I'm not.

I'm a Red-bellied Woodpecker. The Red-headed Woodpecker is a completely different bird — entirely red head, black back, white wing patches, uncommon, and declining. I'm the common one. The one at your suet feeder every morning. The one hammering on the dead branch outside your bedroom window.

My name says red-bellied because an eighteenth-century naturalist named me after a faint blush of pink on my lower belly that you will never see in the field unless you're holding me upside down. The bird with the giant red head, named after its invisible belly. That's what I work with.

Now that we've gotten that out of the way — let me tell you what I'm doing in your yard right now.

I'm caching food. I take a sunflower seed from your feeder, fly to the oak across the street, and jam it into a bark crevice. I do this hundreds of times a day. I maintain dozens of cache sites across my territory. I remember where every one is.

My tongue wraps around the inside of my skull. That's not a figure of speech. The bone that supports my tongue extends from my throat, curves around the back of my skull, and anchors near my right nostril. When I extend my tongue into a beetle gallery in dead wood, it reaches well past the tip of my bill. The tip is barbed and sticky. Nothing in there escapes.

My skull is built for impact. I strike wood at speed, dozens of times per second. A spongy bone behind my bill absorbs the shock. My brain is packed tight against the skull wall with almost no fluid cushion — less room for the brain to move means less damage on impact.

Right now I'm excavating a nest cavity. Both of us — male and female — are chiseling a hole in a dead branch that will take a week or two to complete. The entrance is perfectly round. The chamber inside is deep enough for eggs and chicks. By April there will be eggs. By May you'll hear the chicks screaming for food every time a parent lands on the trunk.

🐦 How to keep me in your yard:

- Suet feeders are my favorite — I visit them more reliably than seed feeders and I'll come back to the same suet cage every morning year-round
- Dead branches and dead trees are where I find food and build nest cavities. If a dead limb isn't a safety hazard, leaving it standing keeps me and several other cavity nesters in your yard
- I cache seeds from your feeder in bark crevices across the neighborhood — if you see a woodpecker jamming something into a tree trunk and flying back to the feeder, that's me banking food for later
- My drumming on your siding or gutter in March is territorial, not feeding. I'm advertising to rivals and mates. It lasts a few weeks and stops once nesting begins

I'm the most common woodpecker in your yard and you've been calling me by someone else's name 🌿

03/14/2026

Recent activities consisted of Shamrocks, umbrellas, manicures & a game of Rummikub over the past couple of days.

03/14/2026

The students added a little luck to our calendar board yesterday 🍀🌈💰

03/14/2026