Chapter Thirteen
I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of a red-headed woodpecker since the spectacular pair that had buzzed Linda and me at Newaygo State Park so many years ago. The woodpecker wasn’t rare in Michigan—not an improbable vagrant like an ancient murrelet or a secretive breeder like the sedge wren. It wasn’t pathologically fussy about its nesting grounds like a Kirtland’s warbler, whose habitat needed to be maintained by controlled burning and cowbird culling. Still, the woodpecker’s numbers had taken a nosedive over the decades. I had never found one in our woods or in any woods in our area, and I wanted to see one while the woodpeckers and I were still around.
When my Facebook friend Vanessa Kaiser Birman posted a photo on her timeline of a red-headed woodpecker in Middleville, which was only about thirty miles away, I asked for particulars. She messaged me that she had found several on the Paul Henry−Thornapple Trail. Describing their location with the same precision she brought to her profession as a CPA, she said, “They are three-quarters of a mile in, where the dead trees are in the marsh area. They can be found on the right and left sides near the first metal bench, which is on the right. This is after crossing the two bridges.”
The specificity confused me, of course. My leaky bucket of a brain started spilling data after “three-quarters of a mile.” When I mentioned that I’d shoot over to the Paul Henry Trail at lunchtime the next day, she said that she didn’t have any client meetings scheduled and could probably meet me there.
I didn’t know if red-headed woodpeckers held any deep meaning for Linda, but to me they seemed emblematic of the early days of our marriage, when we were both vibrant and spontaneous—although, come to think of it, Linda still was, and I had never been. If Vanessa could take me to the birds, I’d take Linda the following the Saturday, or the Saturday after that, if her back allowed. That was my plan. But my budget cell phone had its own ideas. My service refused to function in Middleville, so I couldn’t check in with Vanessa to find out if and when she would arrive.
I waited in my car until the lure of the woodpeckers grew too powerful to resist. Telling myself that she might already be looking for me, I studied a print-out of her directions one more time and hit the trail in search of bridges, metal benches, Vanessa, marshes, and birds. Just like at Roselle Park, cyclists and runners zipped by me as I walked and stopped, walked and stopped, scanning trees and bushes distant and far. I saw downy woodpeckers, a hairy woodpecker, and red-bellied woodpeckers. I even heard a pileated woodpecker across the river. But I couldn’t locate a single redhead.
I lost heart once the marshes, ponds, and river receded and I reached a long straight stretch of the trail that seemed to ribbon out into infinity. I wouldn’t find the bird in the sunlit fields ahead, so I turned around. Halfway back a woman approached with a DSLR dangling from her shoulder. It had to be Vanessa. When I told her about my lack of luck with the woodpeckers, she said, “There are lots of them here this year.”
It was obvious through her Facebook posts and our conversation on the trail that Vanessa was an animal lover through and through. She and her family lived with a menagerie of indoor pets. Although she filled her days with clients and numbers, her passions were animals and photographing birds.
As we headed for woodpecker central, I couldn’t help saying the names of the birds as I heard them, not so much to impress Vanessa but because it was what I did.
“So that’s a blue-gray gnatcatcher,” she said. “I’ve been calling it the screamie me-me. I’ll remember it now.”
I also showed her a singing common yellowthroat, pointed to the leafy canopy where a vocal red-eyed vireo bounced around, and then oohed and ahhed with her after a yellow warbler had given away its hiding place with a “chip” note. Vanessa was a natural. Although she hadn’t been birding long, she had probably learned more over the past year than I had learned in five.
She led me to an area with a large pond on the left. I hadn’t counted benches or bridges this time, but I was sure I had scoured this area earlier. “There’s one,” she said, shaming me by spotting it using her camera and telephoto lens when my binoculars had slid right past the bird. It wasn’t until I found the woodpecker that I started noticing its spooky habitat of dead trees rising from the water, gnarled stumps like ruined monuments, wiry bushes, the steel gray pond itself, and a softening of greenery behind it. I wanted to come back on a foggy morning to watch the woodpecker fly out of the mists and then slice back into obscurity.
The red-head appeared different than I remembered, more like a bird going about its unhurried business flapping from trunk to trunk than the go-for-broke nest defenders that had spun and thrashed the air above our heads, scolding us for invading their territory. I didn’t know whether I preferred the long, lingering look that this distant bird allowed me or the explosive appearances at Newaygo State Park that had been too quick and chaotic to process but that had stuck with me all these years. The tranquil sighting reminded me of running into a high school friend decades later—the wild kid who always got into trouble—and listening as he tells me not about partying or girls or his close brush with the cops, but about remodeling his basement.
Vanessa wanted to keep birding. “Blue-gray gnatcatcher,” she said when we heard the screamie me-me song again. “And that’s an eastern phoebe, right?”
I needed to leave and for the second time headed back the way I had come. But she had given me the gift of red-headed woodpecker vision, and I easily found four more.
The further I got from the Paul Henry−Thornapple Trail, the proportionately larger my excitement about the woodpeckers grew, until I was bursting to share the experience with Linda. I felt like a little kid on Christmas morning when I hopped out of the car and zipped into the house. The one and only thing I wanted to do was sit down and show her the photos of the woodpecker on my camera screen. I hadn’t even seen them yet—I was waiting until we could look at them together.
When I got inside the house I found her lying on a set of pillows on the living room floor. I knew exactly what it meant. Since she couldn’t sit for any length of time, she would do this if we were watching television or if she was involved in an extended telephone conversation. The coiled phone cord stretching in a taut line from the front of the couch to the wall of the dining room indicated she’d be occupied for a while. I considered transferring my photos to the computer, weeding out 50 percent, and then impressing her with the gems. This struck me as cheating. So I waited and I waited.
No bird amazed me more than the red-headed woodpecker like this one who showed up for Linda just after I’d driven sixty miles to see one.
She mentioned somebody’s daughter to the caller, but I couldn’t figure out whether a friend or stranger was tethered to the other end of the line. Telemarketers feared our house. Linda would throw them off-script and induce them to reveal intimate details of their lives. She could have been talking to an agent from a charity, or she might have gotten back in touch with the insurance rep in Seattle from the turkey collision days. I flitted from room to room with as much patience as I could muster, and when she finally plunked the phone back in the cradle I decided not to ask about the call for fear that she would recount the conversation and delay the photos further. I knew I was being selfish, but outright joy seldom inhabited my frame, and I needed to discharge some of it.
“Two o’clock!” she moaned. “How did it get to be so late? I haven’t even had my lunch.” From the kitchen she asked, “Did you get to see your birds?”
“I’ll tell you later,” I said. While she ate her veggie-meat sandwich, I trekked out to the barn and did her outdoor chores for her. I changed the pool and bucket water and fed bread and lettuce treats to the ducks and geese. Finding a fat worm under a rock, I tossed it to our hen, Ginger, who muttered excitedly as she pecked it. I had timed my absence perfectly. When I reached the top of the basement stairs, Linda had finished eating and was cleaning her paper plate with a damp washcloth before stashing it next to the breadbox to use another day.
“You won’t believe how beautiful those woodpeckers were,” I told her as we plopped down on the couch. “I’ll just skip to the good ones.” I clicked through the first dozen shots in search of a standout. Then another dozen. Then fifteen or twenty more. Before I knew it, I had cycled back to the beginning and found myself scrounging for the least of the worst in a miserable batch. I settled on a fuzzy profile of a distant bird partially obscured by leaves and branches. I had nothing else to show her.
“Were they all that far away?” she asked. “We could practically reach out and touch them at Newaygo State Park.”
“We can’t go there anymore. It wouldn’t be good for your back.”
As we took our afternoon walk in our woods, instead of straining to hear birds or staying alert for movement in the trees or bushes, I tried to paint her the picture that I had failed to capture with my camera. “They definitely seemed much bigger through binoculars,” I said. “Their heads were this amazing bright red when the sun hit them, and the setting reminded me of a haunted bayou. It wasn’t like anything you’d expect to find in Middleville. We’ve really got to go there, since I know right where they are.”
“I like seeing birds up close. It’s too frustrating otherwise.”
“You’ll be able to see them just fine.” Through no fault of Linda’s I had suddenly grown defensive about an experience that, up until fifteen minutes earlier, had been the highlight of my month. And not only did a steadily developing bad mood dampen my excitement over the woodpeckers, but it was also keeping me from paying attention to the cardinals, song sparrows, Baltimore orioles, great-crested flycatchers, and other birds that I heard calling as we walked along the river.
A green damselfly crossed the path in front of us, vivid metallic emerald, and another fluttered just ahead of our feet. When a third landed on a sprig of weeds, I noticed that a white spot punctuated its black wings at the highest point of the curve. Maybe I’d begin learning damselflies, dragonflies, butterflies, katydids, and spiders to fill in the gaps between birds. Or I’d start appreciating the appearance of the river, which never looked the same two days in a row. Today it was busy bouncing back ripples of sunlight onto trees along the bank.
The brightest spot detached itself from the shadows and sailed to the edge of our path.
“Do you see that?” I asked Linda. “I can’t believe I’m seeing what I’m seeing. Don’t even move.” I hardly dared to raise my binoculars. “Straight ahead. Look toward that X of branches, where the limb has broken off, then left to the biggest tree—climbing up the bark.”
It took her a second. “How is that even possible?” she asked.
“It’s the closest I’ve been to one all day.”
Twenty-two years we’d lived in our house. If we knew any bird since day one, we knew this bird, and no red-headed woodpecker had ever shown up in our woods before. Like the red-breasted nuthatch, the pine siskin, and the white-winged crossbill, it had waited to come to me until I had sought it out miles from home. This was the loop-back effect at its most powerful and its most mysterious. Stumbling onto a flock of brilliantly colored warblers in a tiny patch of brush during a single flickering moment of time was nothing compared to the mountain-cliff improbability of discovering a bird and then having it reflected back at me.
Who was the finder, and who was the found? Was I, in fact, the hare, not the hound? A bird dog dogged by birds?
If the phenomenon had any meaning, on this day the meaning seemed clear. I loved birds, and every bird was my favorite bird. But no bird was a better bird than a bird I saw with Linda. This had been true from when we had first met, and it was even truer now. Not counting, of course, the next sedge wren, Franklin’s gull, red-necked phalarope, or ostrich I’d run into—totally by accident.