We have new neighbors. They haven’t put up curtains yet and we have been shamelessly watching them in their new, toxic-free, energy-efficient home. The wife beats her head against the walls, shouts a lot and did all the renovations. The husband is a loud mouth too, but nobody’s complaining. These new residents are birds about the size of crows: northern pileated woodpeckers.
We can easily see the nest site from the southern windows of our home (most of which have curtains!). Our new neighbors chose their home site with care: a dead stub sculpted by an ice storm (for Mainers, THE ice storm) in an otherwise live white ash.
After weeks of excavating a carefully chiseled cavity, Mrs. Pileated appears to be laying eggs or is already brooding three or four eggs. These birds are spectacularly good neighbors: they are quiet after sundown, use no annoying night lighting, do not contaminate the groundwater, don’t let their children speed down neighborhood streets, don’t litter and can really perk up a dull afternoon with their antics.
There is something satisfying about watching a bird that always seems to know where it’s going and what it’s going to do when it gets there. Nearly everything about these striking, boldly patterned, black and white birds with their incredibly red crests is definite.
Known for their loud, dramatic calls (CACK! CACK! CACK!) and for their woodworking abilities, pileated woodpeckers are full-time residents of the Maine woods. No winter sojourns to points south for these frequent flyers.
Eating a variety of nuts, fruit and insects, as available, in other seasons, northern pileated woodpeckers hang around all winter and eat carpenter ants. Rather than damaging our forest trees with their apparent “attacks,” pileated woodpeckers help protect ant-free trees by unerringly hacking into ant nests and eating the inhabitants – sometimes over 1,200 of these big, acrid ants are downed at one meal.
This last remark is not to be taken as an affirmation of a notion that carpenter ants deserve to be eaten – the ants themselves play an important role in a forest’s ecology, returning dead, often fungus-ridden wood to the forest floor to support future growth. Without ants there would be no pileated woodpeckers in the woods.
The call of a nearby pileated woodpecker can startle those unfamiliar with its intensity, but, like the tremolo call of a loon, reminds us we are not the only beings interested in making a statement on this damp rock. Not a threatening, but certainly clear: “Hey, I live here too!”
While we continue to kill and threaten our own species and are far from being “spectacularly good neighbors” to most other creatures, it is exciting to understand that we are definitely forging better relationships with some of our neighbors. Can we dare believe that we are beginning to agree to a new social contract and are moving consistently in this direction?
Not so long ago, this new neighbor of ours would have probably been shot, no questions asked. Now people pay to come to Maine for a chance to experience the thrill of just hearing this bird let us know that it lives here too. FootPrint celebrates diversity in all its forms.
Dudley Greeley can be contacted at [email protected]