“There’s no accounting for the inaccuracies of memory or the prognostications one can only see looking backwards.”— Jennifer Delahunty, from “Future Perfect,” an essay published in Fourth Genre, Spring 2022.
In my mind’s eye, as clear as what once was reality, I saw the trail winding ahead through a rough forested landscape of bluffs and ravines at Spring Lake Park north of Macomb. For the longest time, the only wildlife was a fleeing white-tailed deer. Where are the birds? I had wondered. I was there for the hike, but I also wanted to see birds, maybe catch the tail end of the fall migration. So I slowly kept following the trail, highly attentive to my surroundings. Still, all I heard was the wind. But then, after a short while, as if a genie had granted a wish, I heard a faint “kluk, kluk, kluk, kluk” echoing among the trees. A pileated woodpecker. I knew these woods were large enough to attract this species, but they’re not common. In the leafless forest, I was able to track down the bird by listening for its calls and searching with my binoculars. It was about 500 feet away, climbing the side of a shagbark hickory. Then, as if my mind-video had lost its streaming connection, the images dissipated, replaced by the actual reality and frustration of being stretched out on the living room couch, starring at the ceiling, as I paused between chapters of Paul Theroux’s novel, The Family Arsenal.
Pileated woodpecker (Photo credit: Cornell Lab of Ornithology).
Doctor’s orders. I was into the second week of recovery from outpatient surgery: lie down as much as possible during the day, no hiking, no exercise, lift nothing heavier than a gallon of milk. I think I never realized just how incredibly delicate is the human body. Could recovery really take four weeks?
Outside it was all deep snow and ice; two bad January storms back to back. My wife Julie shoveling; me watching out the window, feeling helpless as a newly hatched spring chicken. I adjusted the headphones and listened to solo piano music, hoping to perhaps drift off to sleep and dream of better days. And while attempting to steer my dream’s subject matter, I thought again about past encounters with pileated woodpeckers.
I saw my first around 1980 while vacationing in a small cabin near a remote lake in northeastern Minnesota, just outside the Superior National Forest. This was the truest wilderness I had ever seen, stretching to the U.S. border and into Canada’s Quetico Provincial Park. At the time, I was living in the Chicago area, before I had really begun paying attention to birds; so house sparrows, rock doves, and American robins were nearly the only birds I noticed, and then not very closely. I glanced out the cabin window as I ate breakfast when a large black and white bird with a red crest, comparable to a crow, drew my attention as no other bird had ever done. It landed on a tree stump and began pounding its massive beak into the rotting wood, searching for insects, I assumed. I was excited to see this rare bird, one that I imagined could only be encountered in a wilderness.
After that, I began thinking of the pileated woodpecker as a bird exclusively of the pristine North Woods. I never expected to see one south of the Wisconsin border, let alone in Chicago. So when I returned home, I left thoughts of pileated woodpeckers in Minnesota and focused on my college studies and finding a way into a depressed job market.
Several years later I was on a summer trip visiting the forested areas of southeastern Missouri when, at Trail of Tears State Park, I had another close encounter with a pileated woodpecker. The day was hot and humid, and the forest was dense and tall; the sense of being alone in a vast wild area was not an illusion. And when I saw the bird, it seemed to be a highly appropriate sighting considering the surroundings, but it also challenged my rigid association of this bird with the North Woods. They were more widespread than I had assumed. For some reason, though, I never thought about consulting a bird guide for more information, preferring, I guess, to learn by experience.
Once I began spending more time along the Illinois and Mississippi rivers in southwestern and central Illinois, I soon noticed that pileated woodpecker sightings were quite reliable in the bottomland forests, which tend to have large fast-growing trees such as eastern cottonwood and silver maple. And I usually had little trouble finding large holes in trees, some rectangular, that had been excavated by these birds as they foraged for insects or hammered out spacious nesting cavities, which might one day be used by wood ducks.
Holes excavated by pileated woodpeckers.
One particularly vivid recollection of a pileated woodpecker that I often replay in my head occurred near Andalusia along the Mississippi River. I was following the Great River Road on a quite indirect route back to Macomb. Despite its name, the road provided only occasional glimpses of the river itself. So when a sign announced a small roadside park near the river, I immediately pulled off the highway. At the parking area, I didn’t see a trail leading to the river, so I bushwhacked my way to the riverbank through some brush and flood debris. From there I had an unobstructed view of the 8.5-mile-long Andalusia Island across the side channel; the Mississippi’s main channel was on the other side of the half-mile-wide island. After only a few moments, a pileated woodpecker, about a quarter of a mile downstream, flew across the channel toward the forested island. Its characteristic undulating flight was unmistakable. That scene has remained undiminished in sharpness and detail.
The Mississippi River and Andalusia Island.
* * *
Three weeks and I was losing patience with the slow recovery from surgery, even though lying around reading all day is nearly my favorite activity. Mild temperatures had returned, melting the deep snows of January; northern cardinals and house finches tentatively sang. So Julie and I seized the day to check on our cabin—closed up for the winter—along the Illinois River valley at Quiver Lake.
Along the way, my mind easily shifted into birding mode, noting American kestrals perched on utility wires along the highway, a few soaring red-tailed hawks, an occasional bald eagle, and small flocks of horned larks in the bare-soil farm fields and along the roadside. But there really was not much wildlife in the flat, gently rolling uplands. Then east of the small town of Ipava, the ravines began to deepen as we neared the Spoon River valley; habitats became more diverse; and there eventually followed the wide Illinois River valley, with bottomland lakes, sloughs, wetlands, forest, and fields. This is what I needed to help pull me forward to better days.
At the Emiquon Preserve and Refuge area we ate our lunch as thousands of snow geese rested in the open waters or occasionally took to the air in gradually building numbers until nearly all the birds were circling; then most of them would settle back to the water until the next cause for alarm, which seemed to be as simple as a lone bald eagle flying too close. Nearly two miles away, across wetlands and open water, a towboat-barge traveled down the flooding Illinois River; the water was high enough so the tops of the barges were visible above the distant levee. Later we pulled over to the side of the levee highway to view small groups of waterfowl, and here we heard our first red-winged blackbird song of the year, an event that I have long assigned to be the official beginning of the spring bird migration, the ending of which, by my reckoning, would be in May with the first call of a yellow-billed cuckoo, newly arrived from South America. Near the blackbirds, a hidden western chorus frog called—another first for the season.
Our cabin remained intact and safe, and I was relieved not to find a fallen tree blocking our entrance lane or even worse, a tree lying across the cabin itself. During a brief walk down the bluffs to the flooded lakeshore, I scanned with my binoculars, from the southwest to the north, for birds flying over the floodplain forests on the far side of Quiver Lake. But of course, I knew as I was doing so that just scanning for a pileated woodpecker would be unlikely to produce one. We stayed only a short time at our cabin before beginning the hour drive back home; plenty of time to sort through the day’s highlights.
* * *
Upon returning to our quiet Macomb neighborhood from the cabin, we both had a feeling that was similar to what we typically had experienced after a long road trip from a very different and wild land. When I entered our living room and saw the couch, though, I could no longer avoid the thought of having to slide back into a severe rest and recovery mode, at least for a little while. Back to reading all day and traveling via my mind’s eye—our time at the cabin now being a gentle reminder that there was life beyond the living room walls. Looking up from my books and glancing out the window would no longer create a sense of frozen exile, but would now pull me forward, along with the imperceptibly lengthening daylight hours, toward a cautious optimism. More days at the cabin, spring wildflowers, and planning a fall trip to New England, including Maine’s North Woods and its pileated woodpeckers.
Reference
DeVore, S., S.D. Bailey, and G. Kennedy. 2004. Birds of Illinois. Lone Pine Publishing, Auburn, Washington.