Two male woodpeckers rattle at each other from 100 yards apart. A carpenter bee inspects the porch, its drone a perfect generator of unease.
Tag Archives: downy woodpecker
Thursday April 11, 2013
Pausing every few minutes for a lightning-quick copulation, a pair of downy woodpeckers circle a walnut tree trunk and probe its bark.
Saturday January 26, 2013
This morning’s stillness is made of fresh snow, a distant jet, the quiet squeaks of a downy woodpecker and a dove’s whistling wings.
Friday January 18, 2013
It’s very cold; the tall locust at the woods’ edge creaks with ice. A woodpecker taps on the topmost limb, silhouetted against pink clouds.
Saturday December 29, 2012
Snow piles up on branches, as if the white sky were descending on a chaos of ladders. Only a woodpecker’s soft tapping breaks the silence.
Monday September 10, 2012
A downy woodpecker lands in the dead cherry tree. She trills and the rotten limbs tremble, taps and they make hardly a sound.
Tuesday June 05, 2012
Wind from a distant storm blows the leaves backwards. In lieu of thunder, a downy woodpecker’s fast rattle on a hollow limb.
Saturday April 07, 2012
A downy woodpecker has found a loud limb to hammer. When the din stops, he’s with a female. That brief cloacal kiss that passes for sex.
Tuesday March 27, 2012
Woodpeckers drumming at sunrise. It occurs to me that they might not be telegraphing “I am here” so much as verifying that the world is.
Monday February 27, 2012
A downy woodpecker gleans breakfast from the dead cherry, chirping between taps. A mackerel sky. The smell of thawed earth.
Tuesday December 13, 2011
Sun through a skim of clouds. A nuthatch and a downy woodpecker trade anxious, nasal notes between the faint shadows of the trees.
Saturday November 19, 2011
Bare ground in the herb bed has risen into spires—a city of frost. A downy woodpecker booms like a pileated on a hollow limb.
Sunday November 13, 2011
Mid-morning, and my feet are propped on the rail as usual. A female downy woodpecker lands on my right boot and taps at the worn-down sole.
Saturday August 27, 2011
A downy woodpecker lands on the dead elm, his black-and-white feathers against the barkless trunk as startling and dramatic as a totem pole.
Saturday August 13, 2011
Darkening sky. A downy woodpecker gleaning breakfast from the dead cherry’s flaking limbs pauses to scratch his face with one fast foot.
Sunday February 13, 2011
To the south, the hysterical-sounding whoops of a pileated woodpecker. To the north, the rapid taps of a downy, that tachycardia.