Rainier's lush forests are packed with trees young and old plus many dead snags, and are therefore home to many hole-making birds including the hairy woodpecker, downy woodpecker, northern flicker, pileated woodpecker, and red-breasted sapsucker.

In all the years I've been traipsing around this mountain I have often heard their drilling, but only managed to come away with this one overly zoomed photo of a hairy woodpecker.

The hairy woodpecker and downy woodpecker are an example of convergent evolution. The species are not closely related but cover the same terrain (most of North and Central America) and look almost identical. The hairy is larger than the downy, which means they feed on differently sized trees, so competition between the two is minimal even though their ranges overlap. Weirdly, both species show the same regional variations. The best way to tell them apart is length of the bill: the downy woodpecker's is short while the hairy woodpecker has a bill roughly the same length as its head.

Females lack the red head patch of the males.

They mostly eat insects, especially the larvae of wood-boring beetles, but will also consume berries, seeds, and nuts.

Mating pairs create nests by excavating holes in dead trees.