Woodpeckers... in Albuquerque?

[wunderhund]

So, are woodpeckers common in Albuquerque? Because I can't remember ever seeing them before, but this morning whilst taking Tuggy-dog for a walk, we ran across a couple of them in a tree. After getting back to the house, I grabbed my D80 and went back to get some pics. The auto 18-135mm lens just wasn't cutting it, so I went back to the house and brought out the 450mm prime. I had quite a bit of trouble getting good pictures with it, and what would have been the best pictures were ruined because I'd left the manual mode set to a shutter speed of 1/20 and didn't realize it for the first few shots. Keeping the bulky lens steadily aimed in the bitter cold wasn't working out too well either; that lens really benefits a lot from a tripod (which I didn't feel like dragging down the street). Nevertheless, I feel like I got a few decent pics, which you can check out on my Flickr photostream. I only realized this after I got back home and looked at the photos, but there were actually two of them; a red-crested one (male, I presume) and a black-crested one (female?). The only pics I got of the female were with the zoom lens, so they're not nearly as good. Here's a couple of the 450mm shots of the male that came out okay:







[edit: looks like these are ladder-backed woodpeckers, which "can be found year-round over the southwestern United States".  Cool.]