Cold, dark and dramatic. Already our Canadian winter is living up to its reputation, with record-breaking snowfalls shutting down great swaths of Ontario cottage country, including Minden. Just in time for the Christmas Bird Count.

My husband and I didn't get to canoe the Gull River this year, as we often do, for frigid temperatures following the two-day dump of snow quickly started closing up all open water. But I caught a thrilling glimpse of an adult bald eagle flying down the middle of Gull Lake, over the last black open stretch far from shore. It landed in a pine on an island and promptly vanished, its white head lost among the myriad clumps of snow caught in needles and branches.

Not only did we not canoe, we didn't even snowshoe. What was the point of floundering through four feet of powder? Our birding was limited to plowed roads -- all dotted with tracks of deer trying to make their way about the countryside, searching for food. Four does and an antlered buck were hungrily scrounging for scraps at the local dump when we drove in to count the ravens, crows and starlings that congregate there in winter.

With virtually no cone crops providing wild food this year, count numbers were lower than usual. But some birds stick around no matter what's going on in nature. And my highlight of the day was just such a species.

Dennis and I were walking along a back-woods road, pishing for chickadees, when I heard a woodpecker tapping. I moved toward the sound and soon found the bird chipping away at the bark of a dead balsam fir right on the roadside.

Dead balsam? That's highly diagnostic. With great excitement I raised my binoculars. As I hardly dared hope, the woodpecker had charcoal-black wings, back and tail, instead of the white back and flecked wings of a same-sized, common hairy. I whistled, then beckoned for Dennis to come running.

It was a black-backed woodpecker, a permanent but rarely seen resident of northern forests. For long minutes we watched this very co-operative bird working away right over our heads, scraping off patches of loose bark in its search for insects, instead of drilling into the tree as other woodpeckers do.

With the day so cold, it had its feathers fluffed up like a powder puff, showing off the fine black-and-white barring on its sides. It was a male, distinguished by the bright yellow oval patch atop its head.

Black-backed woodpeckers have three toes instead of four, two on top to grip the bark. Propping their short tails against the trunk, they efficiently tap away. The possibility of finding one is a great motivation for getting out in a northern woods this winter.

Nature queries: 905-725-2116 or mcarney@interlinks.net.