A call half-cackle, half-whinny: red-bellied woodpecker. I spot him in the sunlit crown of a locust, round red head beside a hole.
red-bellied woodpecker
Morning full of the cries of woodpeckers—part ululation, part rusty hinge. Like the sounds the trees make in a winter wind, speeded up.
Cloudy and warm. A robin sings in the yard, garrulous as an unmarried uncle. Red-bellied woodpeckers leapfrog each other on a tree trunk.
A goldfinch gone green lands among walnut leaves that have gone yellow. Below, a juvenile red-bellied woodpecker, nape turning orange.
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.
A red-bellied woodpecker’s head going up and down at the top of a tall locust, squeaking like a red marker on the whiteboard sky.
Dawn fog lifts and pauses, so it’s clear to a height of ten feet, then white, then the crescent moon. A red-bellied woodpecker’s slow chant.
For an hour now, the red-bellied woodpecker has been trilling almost non-stop: half yell, half peal. Fleabane blooms beside the sidewalk.
Easter Sunday dawns clear and cold. The yard is stippled with fresh tracks. Quiet except for a mourning dove and a red-bellied woodpecker.
Siren, train whistle, a red-bellied woodpecker ululating in the yard. It’s snowing. Squirrel tracks cross the porch in front of my chair.