Looking Out: The bird is the word
“Who wants to go look for a pileated woodpecker?” says Clyde at breakfast.
A whole gang of us are in the north woods staying in a big log cabin lodge. I’ve never heard of a pileated woodpecker but going for a walk with Clyde is enough incentive.
We wander the forest for a couple of hours, seeing lots of birds and critters but no pileated woodpeckers.
Every year thereafter for a couple of decades we gather in the same spot and every year Clyde leads us on a pileated woodpecker hunt. We never see one, and I’ve transitioned from youth to middle age.
Naturally, I have looked at bird books to see just what it is that’s so special about a pileated woodpecker.
They are huge! They stand 18 inches tall and are noisy, both vocally and with their chop-chop-chop that sometimes breaks small trees in half. Woody Woodpecker is modeled after one of these brassy birds. Now I really, really want to see one.
My beloved wife Marsha’s parents move from New York state to Georgia and build a house in the woods. On our first visit, we were sitting in lawn chairs on their screened-in porch when a big bird fluttered to the ground right behind my mother-in-law.
Finally! It is my first sighting of a pileated woodpecker. It is a magnificent bird.
“It’s a pileated!” I whisper. “Don’t move!!”
My mother-in-law turns to see the bird standing two feet behind her on the other side of the screen.
She leaps to her feet, turns around and starts flapping her arms and hollering, “GO AWAY! GO AWAY!”
No surprise. It does go away.
“I hate that bird,” she says. “It comes all the time.”
Twenty years of stalking the Northwoods in search of one of these magnificent creatures, and finally, in the Deep South, I see one only to have my mother-in-law chase it away.
Fortunately, over the years since, I have seen many of the big birds and it is always a joy to see and hear them. There’s a pair living near our current home in the woods.
Just yesterday as I was rolling my bicycle out of the garage for a ride, one landed on a black cherry tree next to my driveway, ignoring me. It gently tapped on the tree a few times to see if it could hear any ants inside. It soon gave up on that tree and flitted to another and then another where it finally struck pay dirt and started to chop away in earnest.
I could hear its mate chopping somewhere deeper in the woods but couldn’t spot it.
These birds can make huge holes in trees, but only to eat the ants and other bugs that are destroying the tree from the inside out, so I don’t mind.
It was cold outside, so as I stood lightly dressed for my bike ride watching Big Bird pretending to be an arborist, I got a little chilly. I moved a little and the bird, startled, flew off.
Smiling at the experience, I lifted my hand to the sky, saying to my late mother-in-law, “You would have hated that.”
She was a wonderful woman but had very bad taste in birds, other than her delicious and savory Thanksgiving turkeys.
— Jim Whitehouse lives in Albion.
This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Looking Out: The bird is the word
