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Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow

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downy woodpecker

March 8, 2010 by Dave Bonta

A chipmunk dashes over the snow from one tree melt-hole to another. A downy woodpecker finds a hollow limb that makes him sound enormous.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags chipmunks, downy woodpecker
February 24, 2010 by Dave Bonta

A morning for woodpeckers: I hear the trilling of a red-bellied, the cackling of a pileated, and a downy’s steady trepanning of a maple.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags downy woodpecker, pileated woodpecker, red-bellied woodpecker
February 14, 2010 by Dave Bonta

Gray mid-morning, and the sound of bells comes and goes on the wind. A downy woodpecker telegraphs his hunger from a limb of the big maple.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags downy woodpecker
March 5, 2009 by Dave Bonta

A downy woodpecker plays a dead locust limb like a marimba, moving rapidly from pitch to pitch, a tremor of red against the blue sky.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags downy woodpecker
February 22, 2009 by Dave Bonta

White sky. The soft calls of a pair of downy woodpeckers on adjacent trees. Four chickadees on a high-speed chase tear through the lilac.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags chickadee, downy woodpecker, lilac, red-bellied woodpecker
December 15, 2007 by Dave Bonta

The sun peeks out for half a minute from under a lid of clouds. The downy woodpecker finds a resonant bone of locust and rattles it hard.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags downy woodpecker
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On This Day

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    Just as my moonlit shadow slips away into the dawn, the Carolina wrens who roost beside the laundry room door start up, with a brassy…
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    Warm rain. The snow has shrunk to a few scrofulous patches in the woods. Half an hour before sunrise, a bluebird is singing.
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Related book

Cover of Ice Mountain with a linocut of a big ridgetop tree.

What I do after I sit on the porch. One winter and spring's daily walks distilled into short poems with linocut illustrations by Beth Adams.

Header image: detail from Paper Garden by Clive Hicks-Jenkins (used by permission)

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