Rain and fog. A pileated woodpecker performs invasive surgery on a locust tree next to the springhouse, removing a malignant colony of ants.
pileated woodpecker
Colored leaves turn backwards in the cold wind—still the same pale green. A pileated woodpecker’s distant chant.
A pileated woodpecker heading for the tall locusts lets out a whoop with every wingbeat, its crest like the bloody barb of a harpoon.
Morning full of the cries of woodpeckers—part ululation, part rusty hinge. Like the sounds the trees make in a winter wind, speeded up.
To the south, the hysterical-sounding whoops of a pileated woodpecker. To the north, the rapid taps of a downy, that tachycardia.
The snowpack glows in the soft, mid-morning light. A dog barks in the valley. The resonant knocks of a woodpecker opening a new door.
I pause at the door, coffee in hand: six juncos decorate the dead cherry, fat, motionless. A pileated woodpecker cackles at the wood’s edge.
Dawn. In absolute silence, a pileated woodpecker hitches its way up a locust trunk, silhouette pivoting like a pawl on an invisible ratchet.
Just past daybreak, a pileated woodpecker whinnies, a nuthatch tuts, a crow croaks, and a gray squirrel clatters through gray branches.
A succession of anxious or querulous calls—nuthatch, crow, Cooper’s hawk, pileated woodpecker—until sunrise reddens the western ridge.
I watch the sunbeams’ slow drift of mites and motes, entranced, until a shadow cackles: pileated woodpecker resplendent in his tribal crest.
A pileated woodpecker explores a fallen tree in the meadow, the scarlet arrow of his crest appearing and disappearing in the dame’s-rocket.
So clear, even the mourning dove sounds joyful. Muffled thuds of a pileated in a dead tree, knocking—as Rumi would say—from the inside.
Through green-gold leaves backlit by the sun, a scarlet flame and the slow, newspaper flap of black and white: pileated. The Good God Bird.