Pileated male or female

Yesterday, I was watching a Pileated Woodpecker scrounge for grubs and ants in a piling. I took many pictures hoping to capture something interesting, but in the end, I only show one image and the bird is just sitting there. Its activity was interesting enough, but a question kept arising: what sex is the bird?

Now the standard way to determine the sex of a Pileated Woodpecker is to look at its malar stripe. This is the line angling back from the bird’s bill separating the cheek from the throat — sort of a moustache. If this is red, the pileated is male; if it is black, the pileated is female. Sometimes it is as simple as that. But, sometimes the malar strip is dim and inconsistent. Now what?

Yes, there is something else.

Here is the one picture from yesterday’s shoot of the Pileated Woodpecker. What colour is the malar strip?

Here is a 2011 shot of a female pileated. The malar strip is black, but there is something else: the bird’s red crest ends above the eye. From there to the beak it is black. It turns out that this shortened appearance of the crest is another indication of a female.

Now we return to the a blowup of the original picture. On the male, the red crest extends almost to the beak. In the blowup, the redness of the malar strip is also more evident, but it is dark. This bird is a male as revealed by both the crest and the malar strip.