WOODPECKERS AND KNOW-IT-ALLS

Another snowed-in day, watching my naive garden get buried, imagining my winter spinach patiently pressing its green face against the pale window of deepening snow. As for the rest, the flakey wind has had a ball with my varied anti-wind and -snow ploys. Next year I am smarter.

A couple of times a day I plunge into the storm and get some firewood at one of the stacks. This morning I uncovered one stack of 2-year-old cherry wood, split from a large trunk; the layered slabs looked to my hungry eyes like huge fillets of sun-dried wild salmon lying there, waiting to be taken in and roasted over a cherrywood fire.

That wood burns like a dream fuel: no smoke, hot, long-lasting embers. Brought armfuls back to the house to burn, some oak and beech to mix in and temper the fire, save the wood we have stacked in the rack on the deck by the door until the snow gets too deep for easy passage, at which point we start using the rackwood, a couple of week’s worth. If it snows beyond that, I’m into some serious shoveling and arm transport, but I’m ready. When you live up here, big weather is the university and the gym.

As it is for that guy out there in the whitestorm, the great spotted woodpecker, a juvenile male with his red belly, fresh and antsy even out there in a fierce blizzard, pecking hunger at one trunk of the cherry tree, the living and healthy (as far as I can tell) cherry tree, pecking like the king of beetle larvae is partying inside. Round and round he goes, pecking like mad, pausing now and then to listen: does he know what he’s doing, pecking where I’ve never seen another woodpecker peck, he’s just a teen after all, and this his first winter, he’s working really hard for lunch and nothing to show for it so far, in the 20 minutes I’ve been watching, first from the deck with arms full of wood and squinty-eyed from the blowing snow, then from the big kitchen window with the binoculars.

Sometimes it’s hard to see him for the streaks of snow across the air, as the white rush slides over the mountain from Siberia and down toward the lowlands, for a change just like the weatherman said it would... All the birds out there must be having a hard time finding meals now, even the nanten berries are gone... Every once in a while the youngster out there with the red crown stops and looks upward, turning his head and listening... how can he hear another bugsound elsewhere in that storm, with the wind rattling the naked branches, the snowclumps falling to the ground? He bounces slowly around the trunk, a natural dancer, fully dedicated to whatever may come, in mountain air now filled with diamond dust at a brief gaze from the sun...

Now time for my own lunch...

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Epilog: The next morning I went out in the snowfall to see what he’d been up to hammering away in ignorance at a healthy tree like that, just a teen after all, and had one of those experiences that know-it-alls always have sooner or later, kind of a nature-knowledge karma (now hitting us all big time), in this case that a woodpecker of any age, in just one look and listen, can tell more than I ever could about the overall condition of a standing tree and whether it's worth pecking at for a beetle larva, which to be fair is not one of my personal priorities, which I guess gives him a useful edge… He’d been hammering away right at the perimeter of where that trunk was beginning to rot… Another job for me, come late winter…