To birders, “looking through the glass” refers to binoculars. Wildlife photographer Glen Apseloff, however, thinks of the phrase as referring to the windows of his house. Using a handheld camera without a flash or special filters, he has photographed enough birds from inside his house, through closed windows, to create two books. Some of the photographs and text in this slideshow can be found in his more recent book, Backyard Birds and More—Looking Through the Glass. All of the birds in this slideshow, like all of those in his books, were taken through closed windows from inside his home in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio.
He wrote each of the captions in the following slideshow.
Pileated Woodpeckers are the largest woodpeckers in Ohio — almost as large as American Crows — and are year-round residents here.
Males have a red mustache, and their red cap extends to their bill. Otherwise males and females appear similar. They reach about 19 inches in length and have a wingspan up to about 30 inches. They nest in cavities and eat carpenter ants and other insects from dead trees. Their excavations while foraging are so large that sometimes they will cause smaller trees to break in half. For nesting, they prefer very large, dead trees. Males do most of the excavating, and their nests can be up to two feet in depth. They line their nests with wood chips from the excavation.
The oldest documented Pileated Woodpecker in the wild was a male that lived at least 12 years and 11 months. He was banded, recaptured, and rereleased in Maryland.
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