REALLY LOCAL NEWS 

• Wild pig invades property, ravages nothing in particular: “Just for fun of it” 

• Leaves filling culvert and accumulating on roadside await attention 

• Hornets nearly the size of  your hand invade carpenter bee nest in front eave; aftermath recalls Punic Wars 

• Crow stops using chestnut tree outside upstairs bedroom window for nationwide dawn announcements 

• Garden growing feral, organizing; home committee shorthanded, indecisive 

• Deer enjoys nightly snack of beautiful pumpkin leaves growing in all directions from compost pit outside garden fence; “succulent blossoms a special treat” 

• Fall of deceased oak awaited, chestnut going piece by piece 

• Green wheelbarrow with yellow handles full of broken garden pots; mental committee allegedly forming 

• Cherry limb that should have been trimmed a long time ago now popular woodpecker resort 

• Uncleaned rain gutter bitches and moans even in light rain 

• Brady hears loudest thunder in his life, in clear midday, right outside house; suspects unilateral attempt at stimulus 

• Mushroom logs confused by weather have no idea where they are 

• Anonymous midsized bird begins enjoying Brady cucumbers 

• Water pressure falls unexpectedly one morning for no reason 

• Generous village neighbor leaves some of her surplus sweet onions beside our door 

• Local farmers visit upmountain paddies now and then  

• All calm as rice grows 

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...

***

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…

LIFE IN LEFT FIELD

The other day I was outside just standing around as one can tend to do on sudden splendid winter days when there is so much to do inside, just go outside and stand there and take the whole scene in from all directions, trees earth sun sky you name it, throw in a galaxy or two if you want (it was one of those days), it'll just lighten my heart all the more, when straight out of left field I saw a large woodpecker stroll right up the side of the tall oak tree like you and I walk down the street.

He'd pause every couple of feet and listen to the tree to overhear bug conversations - that's not illegal in the wild - then he'd stroll another yard or so straight up as casually as if he were twirling a cane, cock his ears and eavesdrop, poke a bit at the bark to maybe make a bug yell for help, then glide on upward, very dapper in his pinstripe.

He strolled thus for over twenty meters before the promenade got too narrow and he flew off to begin strolling another tree. And if I hadn't left my urgent indoor tasks and gone aimlessly outside to just pointlessly stand there on the edge of left field I never would have seen the woodpecker stroll.

So if you've got a lot of really urgent stuff to do indoors, why not just go outside and simply stand there for a while? Left field is the greatest place.

ENVIROMASTER

With the past couple days of rain, vegelife is really pushing up, now that it has the hydraulics.

During a rainlull yesterday I was out by the garden checking on things, observing the changes, when I heard a rat-a-tata-racket up in the big oak; I turned that way and froze in place; soon a pygmy woodpecker, one of the locals - stippled a silver and black that marks him as a deep familiar of oak trees (and renders him nearly invisible thereon) - swooped from the big oak down onto one of my stacks of shiitake logs, which are also of oak.

It surprised me, since the shiitake logs had been cut at least two years ago-- what could they hold of interest to his beakship? He hung from the end of one log, suspending himself expertly from two sticklegs, and thoroughly checked out all around and under and on the various logs, then set to cursory work on the log end. But there was nothing there of interest to a woodpecker that I could see, and he wasn't really pecking full out. After a while he hopped to the top of another log, tilted his head to listen, put his head down and ratatatted for a few seconds, then stood victoriously erect, holding at the end of his beak a long fat white grub, held by by the middle!

It was bigger than he could eat comfortably down low in the open like that, so he flew back to the heights of the big oak to dine. I went over to the logs he had been on, and found that on the end of the first log, he had been pecking at a certain lichen-like fungus that grew there. He had eaten it all off! And on the other log, where he had gotten the fat grub, there was only a small hole, about half the diameter of a pencil, which he had so fine-gauged as to enable him to grasp the grub precisely at the middle and pull it out!

What a master.