A pileated woodpecker in western Maine. Andrew Hrycyna photo, via GBIF
A commotion of flapping erupted in the trees along the edge of the woods where I was walking last week. Then what sounded like a forest war cry. Plain as day in an alder thicket 20 or 30 yards away, a large black body as big as a crow with a bright red head.
It was a pileated woodpecker.
It sounded the war cry again. That red top, bright and conspicuous in the tree. A chill rippled in my back. It was as if the bird wanted to be seen. I watched it work in the branches. I wondered what it was trying to say. Then it flew off into the woods. Loud and clamorous. Like it wanted someone to see.
This awestruck feeling on seeing birds is ancient. When Canada geese appear suddenly in a sweeping chevron a few feet over the autumn treetops, a feeling of tremendous grace mounts the air. The beauty seems to be pouring into you. For all the world, you are not making this up.
The anthropologist Frank Speck learned from the Penobscots that “the barred owl, diktagli, was regarded as the guardian of the camp,” and would warn of danger. Other native traditions hold that owls call the name of a person soon to die.
We are schooled to believe we make these things up. Materialist science explains that feelings of beauty or portent are produced by neurochemical processes in the brain. I can understand that neurochemical processes are working. But whatever else is happening when you see the geese, it feels meaningful. The same kind of inscrutable meaning of certain intense dreams. Whether the meaning is in the geese or in your head, no one knows. Some convergence of the two.
The woodpecker was speaking, that much is certain. Birds speak. Whether it was speaking to me, I have no idea. And even if I did know why it showed itself in those alders, or what it was saying, I would have no way of saying it. Only some kinds of meaning are expressible as thoughts.
Toward the end of July this summer, the family gathered at our house and we were hanging out on the back deck, a few feet from the woods. Kids were rollicking the yard, people were talking. I was sitting with my back to the door. Suddenly, there was a “thunk” behind me. I turned around to look.
A medium-sized bird was standing beside the step. It seemed to be happily inspecting the deck, unafraid of the commotion. It had the markings of a warbler, but seemed too large. We guessed it had flown into the door and might be dazed. But it didn’t seem flustered or frightened. This was pretty strange.
I started rummaging around for my cellphone to take a picture. When I got back a few minutes later, the bird was gone. It crossed my mind that it could be an ovenbird, as I had just been writing about them. But that seemed far-fetched. Ovenbirds make a lot of noise — kind of like the pileated woodpecker, in fact — but they stay secreted in the woods. Long story short, the Peterson’s guide drawing of an ovenbird exactly matched my remembered image of the bird on the deck.
A visit right out in the open of an ovenbird seemed strange, and somehow portentous. My wife, Bonnie, was very ill, though that day she was happy surrounded by her kids and grandkids. The stray, conspicuous ovenbird was unsettling.
In ancient times reading bird omens could be fraught. The omen was not always good news.
“It was thought,” Speck says of the Penobscots, “that when a bird was singing happily it was a sign that someone was going to die.”
Ancient Rome had an official college of augurs whose chief responsibility was to interpret bird omens, for better or worse. In some situations, augurs could be blamed by an erratic ruler for the bad news.
That’s how seriously they took birds. However much ancient and indigenous people did not know about neuroscience, they did know about the natural world. More, in some respects, than we do, using the same brains.
A few weeks later, early on the morning of the day Bonnie died, an unusual mixed flock of small birds was hopping around in the clump of young ashes and dogwoods just out the living room window. I watched them while I sat holding her hand. It was hard to identify who they were, exactly. Warblers, some chickadees, a veery maybe, nuthatches, sparrows, what looked like a flicker. They fluttered and murmured out there for hours. Their presence seemed to be speaking, but I didn’t know what they were saying. Until a few hours later, maybe. No one knows.
Although you want desperately to know, you don’t know where your wife went. You have a feeling, like the feeling you get when the geese swing flapping and shouting over the treetops, that she is somewhere else. The neuroscientists’ story that she went nowhere just simply does not compute, when you hold it up to everything you know about cycles and nature’s disposition to reuse complex structures, and about the feeling of beauty.
What you’re left with is that you don’t know and you can’t find out. But it feels very much like everything, here and elsewhere, is interconnected in ways there’s no language for. Sometimes the interconnections ripple through in dreams and in apparitions of birds.
The pileated woodpecker meant something.
That’s as much as you can say about it.
Dana Wilde lives in Troy. You can contact him at dwilde.naturalist@gmail.com. His book “Summer to Fall: Notes and Numina from the Maine Woods” is available from North Country Press. Backyard Naturalist appears the second and fourth Thursdays each month.
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