The sun glints off periwinkle leaves in the yard where snow has just melted. All sounds come from a great distance: crow, woodpecker, train.
pileated woodpecker
Two pileated woodpeckers cackle back and forth. Patches of moss at the woods’ edge seem to glow in the dim light. The smell of rain.
Two pileated woodpeckers forage in the birches, scarlet crests glowing in the sun, the sky below them in the windshield of a parked truck.
Rain and fog. A pileated woodpecker performs invasive surgery on a locust tree next to the springhouse, removing a malignant colony of ants.
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.