Field Notes—

A Hopeful New Year’s Message From A Woodpecker

By Curtiss Clark

The turning of the year always stirs up a small vortex of hope in me. I don’t make resolutions, but I do try to come up with a few positive expectations to cast like rose petals before me into the New Year: that I will find happiness in the simple things of life; that the people I love will be safe and protected; that the world is inclined toward improvement, not ruin.

I am not naïve. I understand that rosy expectations have little chance of realization unless some action is taken to make them possible. So, with that in mind, I walked the road through the woods near my house looking for Christmas ferns to photograph and for a little happiness in the simple things of life.

As frequently happens, my expectations were met — but in a totally unexpected way. Some of the most elusive treasures turn up when you are looking for something else.

As I was photographing the stocking-shaped leaflets of a Christmas fern poking through the snow, I heard the laughing call of a woodpecker deep in the woods. I thought it was probably the red-bellied woodpecker that frequents the suet feeder back at the house. I am not an expert on birdcalls, so I stood, waited, and watched the woods, hoping to confirm my guess.

Then I saw the motion of a bird flying through the trees with the powerful long-stitch looping flight path of a woodpecker. But it wasn’t the red-belly. It was much larger. Crow-sized. It was a magnificent pileated woodpecker.

Although they are not endangered, these large, shy woodpeckers prefer the dense mature forests far removed from where most people live. They are rare not because there are so few of them but because we don’t often see them.

I had seen pileated woodpeckers only twice before — once in Maine 15 years ago and once last summer, when this same woodpecker had come to a dying tree across the street from my house to excavate some deep holes looking for its favorite food, carpenter ants. (Drycopus pileatus has a long, sticky, barbed tongue perfect for lapping up ants; some people call it the anteater of the north.) Pileated woodpeckers mate for life and the couples maintain a territory of at least 150–200 acres year-round. This woodpecker and its unseen mate had evidently decided that the thick watery woodland in my neighborhood was a suitable place to live.

It was my good luck to have a camera in my hands and my bad luck to have it set on auto focus. As I tracked the bird through the trees, the focusing mechanism went wild as it tried to draw a bead first on one intervening tree trunk and then another. The bird stopped briefly a couple of times in trees to listen for insects beneath the bark, giving me time to reset the camera to manual focus and to shoot several incredibly blurry photos.

Then he settled on a maple about 50 yards away for some exploratory pecking. The sharp report of his hammering echoed through the quiet woods. Through the telephoto lens, I could see the profile of his head and red-crested crown, which is familiar to everyone thanks to Woody Woodpecker. Because he was a male, he also had red-on-black moustache markings on his cheeks. He lingered there long enough for me to focus and shoot before he moved on.

Given the time of year and my hopeful frame of mind, I took the woodpecker as a good omen. It represents life and health in the pressured forest habitats of southern New England. More than 50 species of birds, rodents, and mammals use the expertly chiseled holes of pileated woodpeckers as shelter, including wood ducks, flying squirrels, owls, bluebirds, and martens. For me, at that moment, however, it was a reminder that great experiences are always nearby, just out of sight, waiting to present themselves unexpectedly in our determined search for other things. The 19th Century naturalist John Muir put it this way:

“The grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on seas and continents and islands, each has its turn, as the round earth rolls.”

Just because something is not in our field of view doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. If this is the message of the woodpecker, I will apply it at the turning of this year as an omen for happiness, safety, protection, and the prospect for a better world. 2