My sister Carol, who lives four hours north of here, sees pileated woodpeckers all the time. They even come to one of her feeders. We’ve seen as many as nine of them chowing down there at once. It’s quite a show. You don’t see them much this far south, and they’re the sort of birds that, if there were many around, you’d notice.
They’re big, the size of crows. They’re also bold, with black and white feathers and a fabulous red cap. Think Woody Woodpecker for the flamboyance of the cap. These birds have style. Even the holes they make in wood have panache—they’re sizable and have a distinct tendency toward the rectangular.
I noticed a large, pretty-much-rectangular hole in a downed tree in Oakwoods Nature Area this week, and thought, “It’d take a pileated woodpecker to make a hole like that.” Shortly thereafter, deeper in the woods, came the sound of a large woodpecker hard at work. Sure enough, a pileated was laying waste to another downed tree.
I stayed to watch it for some time. It had to have seen me watching, but it didn’t seem to care. Pileated woodpeckers are used to being admired.
Elsewhere in the area, many birds are not looking as lively as the one in Oakwoods. Robins, in particular, are looking whipped. They’re heavily into feeding their new nestlings, at this point in the season. Not long ago, the adults were flitting about, thoughtfully selecting nesting materials, and wafting them away.
No more. These are robins that look like they’re not getting enough sleep. They don’t fly away when you walk by anymore. They walk. Or, they walked last week. Now they just turn their back on you, shoulders slumped and head down, and hope you leave them alone. It’s exhausting to take care of babies, especially nestfuls at a time.
A squirrel gave me the please-don’t-bother-me routine this morning. It didn’t budge from its spot next to me until I turned to check it out. Then it said, “Good grief”—you could see its thought balloon—walked to the back side of the nearest tree, and put its front paws up against the trunk. “You’re not really going to make me climb this, are you?” it continued. “Just keep walking, okay?”
That was a regulation fox squirrel. A couple nonregulation fox squirrels have been in the neighborhood for the last few days. One has a fox-squirrel-colored body and a white tail. The other has a sable-colored body and a blond tail. The sable one was a couple houses away and feeling truculent this morning.
A contingent of sparrows was feeding on the lawn extension, and he decided he wanted them gone. Were they encroaching on territory this newcomer squirrel hoped to establish as his domain? Were they eating something he’d rather keep for himself? Was he just feeling cranky? Hard to say. He ran at them as fast as he could, and they skedaddled, which seemed to be the outcome he had in mind.
One of the multitude of squirrels that frequents our yard, a red squirrel, I think, has taken to leaving himself little treats in the trees. We’re used to squirrels sitting on the deck railing, chomping down on spruce cones. They pull off the hard outer bits, scattering them all over the deck, and eat the yummy seeds inside. The squirrels do this in other spots as well, but they like the deck railing best.
Mr. Thinks-Ahead Red places cones here and there, mostly in the maples. If they look incongruous there, it doesn’t bother him. As long as they’re ready when he’s puckish, at which time he eats them where he left them. He was chowing down on one in a branch just outside a second-floor window this week, without noticing he had an audience.
At length, I moved, and he shot off that branch like he was spring-loaded. I didn’t even catch sight of him again till he was three trees away.
A mixed flock of birds at the back of the yard yesterday included two bluebirds. And, wonder of wonders, the bluebirds checked out the bluebird house. Wrens have used it before, but not bluebirds. Maybe this will be the year.
The visual highlight of a wine-and-cheese gathering this weekend was the view of our neighbors’ ajuga with the sun low in the sky. The flowers have been there since the house was built in the 1960s and have come to constitute a veritable field of purple that seems to glow as with its own source of light. I love it when a sixty-year plan comes together.
15 May 2026