Her “wuk … wuk” cries of alarm and the flutter of feathers as she crossed the lawn to one of our islands of trees would have been equal an overhead flight of a jet airliner only a few days earlier. Despite their secretive nature, an aroused pileated woodpecker has a way with sudden alarm.

This unexpected visit on our suet feeder brought an end to my concern I’d felt earlier after  my two mile walk on our gravel road late last week when barely a sound was heard beyond the crunch of my footsteps on the gravel and crusted snow. Were we this alone here in the vast horizontal grandeur? Were the sounds of the skeins of geese flying overhead days before nowhere to be seen nor heard? Where was the sudden burst of flight from the flock of snow buntings that have captured the edge of the graveled roadside? Even the cattle at a farm to the north were not lowing to break the silence of a cold, stilled winter morning. Walking in such silence was strange and unsettling. 

My walk seemed a prelude to the polar vortex now settled in over the entire continent. By this past weekend it was considered unsafe at any age to be outside and especially on a two-mile walk. Perhaps the countryside was even more silent in those days since. Nothing much was moving, not even a mouse. Joe Pye would have noticed.

The sudden and unexpected flight of the pileated was certainly an exception, and a wonderful surprise a day or two later. It began after I had decided to brew up a pot of split pea soup for dinner, which necessitated a walk out to the studio/garage to our freezer for a hunk of pork hock. When I stepped through the door a batch of birds lifted from beneath the feeder tree. A junco or two, sparrows, a red bellied woodpecker and a pair of nuthatches. All lifting with as much fashion and form as a well tuned choir collectively standing to sing. 

Above the flutter of the choir, though, was the escape of the lone pileated woodpecker, huge and black, it’s beautiful red head bobbing as it squawked and beat its wings in its telltale undulating bouncy flight away from the feeder tree to fly across the lawn. There is no mistaking a pileated woodpecker.

This prompted the gathering of my camera with the long lens to hoist from the studio along with that hunk of pork. I excitedly told Roberta of the pileated, and we began doing surveillance at the various eastern windows near the feeder while I pulled together the soup. About a half hour later she came rushing into the kitchen with a stage whisper, “It’s here! On the deck feeder!”

Sure enough, and I grabbed the camera with the 600 mm lens. Our octagon window in the bathroom was an excellent “blind” and several images were made before it decided to dip and dive off to the beautiful aged-old elm tree hugging the east side of my studio. There it bounced up and down the trunk, stopping briefly to look around before facing the bark where it seemed to note something of interest.

My first thought was, “Oh, no! Not my elm!” You don’t have to walk too far into the oak savanna at Bonanza to see the damage a pileated can do to a tree. I’ve often considered setting up a blind adjacent to the trail to capture an images at that tree, and the major drawback is there hardly seemed to be any fresh chips being added to the pile.  

All of which brought back a memory from so long ago. While working as a stateside photojournalist with the Denver Post, I had just covered an environmental conference in Crested Butte where one of the presenters was Nina Leopold, daughter of one of my guiding “lights”, Aldo Leopold, author of “A Sand County Almanac.” His writing helped guide me back toward nature and wild things. Nina had a flight back to Milwaukee and I was driving home to Denver, and she had accepted my invitation for a ride to the airport.

Among the topics discussed in that long, wintery drive was pileated woodpeckers, along with my desire to finally see one. Though they were rare in the early 1970s, perhaps they’re more so even now. Nina painted some beautiful mental images for me, perhaps from her years of visiting her father’s sand country farm that is now a historical site near the foundation she helped form. 

Several years later after we had moved to Minnesota for an editorial position with Webb Publishing, I would finally see one along the Mississippi backwaters near where we had moved. Sightings have been nearly non-existent since, and have always been a noted moment in the years that followed.

Other than a brief glimpse while driving down the Lake Road, or at an artist’s home along the lake, I actually spied one in our grove one morning a few years ago through the kitchen window while brewing a cup of tea. A worker once said he had spotted one along the edge of the grove although his comment was met with disbelief. Yet, with our acreage of old trees we might have some prime pileated territory. If so, why have our sightings been so rare?

Perhaps they have already settled in since pleated are noted for their covert shyness. Our feeder bird is quite attentive, flying at the slightest sound. We’ve seen it numerous times since, either on a nearby tree or on the deck feeder where it will grasp and circle itself around the little cage of suet to peck away. Hopefully this is an omen, for according to legend pileated woodpeckers are said to be bearers of good fortune and luck, two wonderful attributes a person can always use.