The Woodpecker Song

The interpreter was in the nature house, checking the weather on the computer. Toronto, New York, San Francisco. He liked checking the weather of places he had lived or visited. A small radio, new but designed to resemble a transistor radio from the 1960s was on, keeping him company. He bought it after a windstorm-induced power outage and had quickly become addicted to it. He had it tuned to the all-traffic station. All traffic, all the time.

Amanda bumped open the door and dropped her backpack on the floor. A spool of red yarn rolled out. The interpreter looked at it. His backpack, when he carried one, would never contain yarn. What did yarn have to do with anything?

Amanda, who was a younger, prettier interpreter, but nowhere near as fun to be around or as good an interpreter as her predecessor, Stacey, said to the interpreter, “You’ve been working this job like, since forever. You must know at least one good woodpecker song.”

“Do you mean a song woodpeckers sing? Mostly they just sort of laugh.”

“No. I mean a song people sing about woodpeckers.”

“Who would sing about woodpeckers?”

“What are you listening to?”

He turned it up. It was the bridges and tunnels report.

“You’re listening to traffic?”

“I like imagining the places where people are stuck in slowdowns. I like imagining the jack-knifed semis and the long lines of brake lights, and all the frustrated, angry people in their cars, listening to exactly the same thing I am.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m not one of them.”

“That isn’t normal.”

“I’m going for a walk.” He opened the desk drawer and took out his binoculars and camera. He stuffed the camera into one pocket, the little radio into another. “Try Google. It probably knows a woodpecker song.”


As he walked along the lakeside trail the interpreter noted spring’s latest developments, the unfurling leaf-clusters of Indian plum, the lime-green shanks of skunk cabbage thrusting up from the mud, the new, soft tips fringing the boughs of spruce and fir. Then he came upon a woman wearing a puffy pink jacket, using garden shears to snip the flower-bearing branches of a lakeside willow. She was stuffing them into a plastic bag.

"I’m sorry," said the interpreter. "This is a park. It’s illegal to harvest plants in a park."

"Harvest?" said the woman. The word confused her.

"Cut, pick, remove," clarified the interpreter. "You’re not allowed to remove plants or plant parts from a park."

The woman said, "But these are not plants. See? They’re made of wood." She showed him the cut end of a branch. "They’re pussy willows."

The interpreter said, "A woody plant is still a plant. Anything with flowers is a plant."

The woman stared into her bag, and then held it open for the interpreter to see. "There’s no flowers in here," she said.

The interpreter ran his finger along one of the protruding branches, touching the series of furry willow flower heads. "What do you think these are?" he asked.

"They’re pussy willows," she said. "They’re not flowers."

"Well, whatever they are, you’re not allowed to take them," said the interpreter.

At this, the woman became indignant and said, "I certainly can. Whose tax dollars do you think paid for them?"

As seemed to happen quite often, the interpreter had lost an argument by winning it. The woman huffed, closed the neck of the bag around the branches, and marched away down the trail.


The interpreter guessed the woman would be keeping to the lakeside, where the willows were, and decided to go somewhere else. He turned onto one of the side loops, away from the lake, into a forest of low, arching vine maples and towering Sitka spruce and western red cedar. Perhaps he would find a woodpecker who knew a human song.

He usually carried his binoculars in his hand rather than strung about his neck. They were heavy, rubber-coated 10-by-50s, which he had owned since age fifteen. Most birdwatchers preferred lighter models, 7- or 8-power, which weighed maybe half as much. The interpreter purchased these brutes, wanting the extra magnification, and became so accustomed to them that regular binoculars soon seemed toy-like. They were the only item he still owned from that age. He had lugged them around the world. Through them he had seen quetzal, fruit bat and polar bear. He had allowed countless others to look through those lenses. Some had been close, a few, heart-achingly close, but most had been complete strangers, people who had appeared at his shoulder as if from nowhere and asked what he was looking at. These were, in their dark, glassy weight, a summation of all those years. He supposed that if all the people who had looked through his 10-by-50s were to line up on the loop trail on which he was presently walking, they would stretch the entire length of it.

He was marvelling at his binoculars, holding them flat in his hands as if he had just discovered them, and, coming around a bend, walked into a fragrant cloud. Four youths quickly tucked their hands behind their backs.

The interpreter knew two of them. “Hi Jason, Hi Jordan,” he said. They had done community service hours at the park for possession of a controlled substance. They seemed to want to do more.

“Hey,” said Jason.

“You going bird-watching or something?” Jordan asked nonchalantly.

“You know you shouldn’t be smoking in the park,” said the interpreter. “Anything.”

“You’re not gonna bust us, are you?”

The interpreter wondered how that would possibly play out. “No,” he said, “I’m on my lunch break.”

This seemed to confer amnesty on the pot-smokers, who brought their joints back into the open.

Jordan explained, now that things were cool, “We were gonna go up to the hollow cedar stump, like usual, but there was like these old people going at it in there.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you know, makin’ out.”

“It was way more than makin’ out,” said one of the two the interpreter didn’t know. “Dude had his pants off.”

“It was gross,” said the other. “They were like 40 or something.”

“If you want to go bust them, we’ll provide back-up,” said Jordan.

The interpreter imagined how that would go. "Nope. I think I’ll just call it in. Thanks for the tip.” He walked away, as if headed back to the nature house. “Seeya later," he called. "And don’t burn down the forest.”

“Yeah, seeya, man,” they said.

He heard them laughing as he neared the lakeside trail, where he took a left. He reached into his pocket and turned on his radio. Apart from a fender-bender at Boundary Road and Kingsway, traffic seemed to be moving well everywhere.

“Disappointing,” said the interpreter. He tried to switch off the radio, but accidentally turned the wrong wheel and changed the station. It was necessary to extract the radio from his pocket to line up the little red marker with the numbers. This was when a woodpecker flew across the trail, and landed on a tree not too far into the forest. It wasn’t a Downy—too big. A Hairy! There wasn’t a good picture of a Hairy in the digital image file. He would bring a picture back to Amanda. No need for a song when you have a virtual bird in hand.

Instead of putting the radio away and switching the binoculars to his left hand, he chose to place the binoculars on a log and reach into the right-hand pocket for the camera. Then he put the radio away, and stepped over the log, into the forest, where the woodpecker was scaling a tree, three-quarters hidden on the far side.

He fell into the trap of a bird that remains tantalizingly near, yet never quite gives a clear view. It flitted from tree to tree, luring him onward. In no time at all he was a hundred yards into the woods, and sensed his binoculars were in danger. He hurried back to the log, and his heart sank.

They were gone. Which way had the person taken them? Whichever way, they wouldn’t be far. He ran first in the direction he had been going. Someone in a blue jacket was up ahead, a tall woman walking a yellow lab. The dog was off- leash, in violation of park rules.

The dog heard him first, stopped, and turned with a short, gruff bark. The woman was startled, and quickly tried to leash her dog. The interpreter scarcely registered the animal, or the woman’s reaction.

“Did you take those binoculars?” he asked, as much an accusation as a question.

The woman had no idea what he was talking about. She was bent over, nervously trying to leash her pet.

“Did you see anyone else?”

She looked up. “No!”

He ran the other way, toward the nature house, and saw no one. He ran into the parking lot, prepared to pounce on the hood of any car that might be driving off with his binoculars. All the cars were empty.

Almost in tears, he entered the nature house. Amanda was scrolling down a web page. He looked at his desk. His binoculars were standing up, smack in the middle of it. He ran to them.

“Some lady found your binoculars,” said Amanda. “You left them lying on a log.”

He fell into his chair, clutching them to his chest. “Who was it?”

“No idea. Some lady in a pink coat.”

The interpreter asked, “Was she carrying a bag full of pussy willows?”

“Yup, she gave me some.” Amanda leaned to pluck the stems off her desk. She put them in a jar and brought them over to the interpreter. “You can have ‘em,” she said, and placed the jar in front of him.

“Thanks,” he said.

“No, thank you,” said Amanda. “I found a great woodpecker song from Google.”

The interpreter turned on his little radio and placed it next to the pussy willows. He polished the lenses of his binoculars as he listened. There was a stall in the Massey Tunnel, and traffic was backed up past the Delta Works Yard.

“That's better,” he said.

Next story...

Stop talking about the economy!

"Every time I click on the TV or radio, it's economy, economy, economy!
It's boring, unhelpful, and it makes my head hurt. Why doesn't someone talk about fish?"

Pinguinus impennis.

No blue for you.

Steller's Jay (Cyanocitta stelleri). Click the corvid to enjoy the feathers.

The Steller's Jay in this picture looks like a silhouette. The low-angled light was coming through a thin overcast, and very little of the blue structural colour bounced my way.

No blue, but no mistaking that outline.

Birding, circumstances allowing.

Today was sunny and relatively warm (11 C). The sun is finally doing something besides showing how dirty the windows are. I took a quick trip to the park to see how its inhabitants were dealing with this welcome weather.

The birds were noisy; a Winter Wren was in full song. Squeaky the Anna's Hummingbird was doing territorial dives, and American Robins were clucking in the birches and hollies.

There were a lot of robins. They were trying to get me to declare them harbingers of spring (Oh look! A Robin! Spring is here!), but of course they've been here all winter.

Poseurs.

Nicely posed.

Peregrine. (You'll have to trust me. The camera was attached to the tripod, and, well, those birds are fast.)

A flock of pigeons shot past, looking terrorized--something was up. It was indeed, a Peregrine overhead. It continued on its way as the pigeons landed on a roof and pretended not to be rattled.

It would have been nice to stay longer, but elementary school dismissal times rule my life. Funny how birding is--you can stand there with nothing happening, and then, suddenly all sorts of things start happening. Things just started happening, and then...that sound in the distance. Westminster Chimes. Gotta run.

Squeaky today.

Resolution that's its own reward.

I don't think I've ever made a NewYear's resolution before, but this year I did. It was a very good resolution, in my opinion, mainly for the reason that it's very easy to keep. And this is what it was:

Every morning, before you look at your computer, look out the window.

Ta-dah!

When it isn't foggy, and sometimes even when it is, the real world is worth a first look.

I didn't notice as I took the picture, but there are linear shadows stretching up into the clouds. The sun is rising from behind mountains in northern Washington State. Are the peaks casting the shadows?

A bit more of the same.

Look out the window, let the fog shine in.

Momma Vole.

I choose to recognize Groundhog Day with a post about a true-life rodent encounter. This story comes from my teen years, when I spent the summers as the “Nature Counsellor” at a summer camp in Ontario.

It was an afternoon program and I was with a typical oddball assortment of kids, aged about 8-12. One was carrying a cardboard Pringles can, sharing the stack of potato chips with the others.

We were up to nothing in particular, poking around to see what we could find. Many of the programs had particular themes, but running five programs a day, it was easy to achieve theme-fatigue. The cure was to simply go somewhere and flip rocks and logs. You wouldn’t know what you were looking for until you found it.

We were walking along the edge of a rank-smelling drainage ditch that was half-filled with stagnant water and dead and dying algal blooms. To escape the smell, I was trying to keep a brisk pace, but one child stopped and lifted the only piece of nearby ground cover, a weathered scrap of plywood.

“Whoa!” the children yelled. A small bundle of brown fur flew from the exposed patch and splashed into the ditch. It was a vole. It swam like a miniature muskrat to the far side, scrambled out and vanished in the tall grass.

Left behind in a whirl of dried plant material was a heap of grey-pink jellybeans—five hairless, blind, newborn voles.

“Can we take them back to the nature house and raise them?” the children wanted to know.

Simply put, no. I ran through the list of logistical challenges I could imagine.

“We could feed them to the Milk Snake,” a boy suggested. This sounds cruel, but he didn’t mean it that way. He was trying to make the best of a bad situation. The other kids let him have it, anyway.

I thought we should cover the babies with the plywood, but we couldn’t find an orientation that wouldn’t seem to crush or smother them. In lifting the wood, the supporting structures of the burrow beneath had been ruined. I doubted Momma would be able to find her way back to the babies beneath the repositioned board—if she bothered to come back.

“Could I have the Pringles can?” I asked. I shook out the crumbs and placed the opening next to the baby voles, and gently pushed them inside. It was going to be the Milk Snake solution.

But when I touched them, they squeaked. And when they squeaked, a small brown head poked out from between the grass leaves on the far side of the ditch.

“There’s the mother!” someone whispered.

Mother vole jumped into the ditch, and, amazingly, started swimming back to us. She scurried up our side of the ditch and frantically ran back and forth between our shoes. I placed the Pringles can on the ground, but she of course had no idea that that’s where the babies were. They had stopped squeaking, so I sucked on my lip in my best baby vole impression, and she immediately cued in on the sound. I leaned close to the opening of the can and squeaked again. She ran inside and popped back out with a baby in her mouth.

She jumped into the ditch, swam across and again disappeared into the grass. Now we had a Pringles can containing four baby voles. A minute later, with less hesitation, Momma popped from the grass, plunged into the ditch and swam our way. Everyone stood still and watched, spellbound, as she searched among us. Again I squeaked, and she ran to the can, and again removed a baby, jumped into the ditch, swam across and vanished into the grass.

This happened three more times, until she had rescued all her offspring. She did not come out again, suggesting, perhaps, that voles can count to five.

It was agreed by all to have been an awesome nature program.

We took the Pringles can back to the nature house and put it in a place of meaning, on a shelf next to the antlers, turtle carapace and raccoon skull.

Desolation cakestand.

I wanted a birdbath that wasn’t plastic, and wasn’t tacky. No neoclassical thing with ladies losing their tops, holding a bowl on their heads; there seemed to be a lot of that sort. I was very happy to find a concrete birdbath with a much more suitable motif: Frog by Pond. Perfect for a herpetologist.

But in retrospect, plastic might not have been a bad idea. As any experienced gardener from a periodically cold climate will tell you, a concrete birdbath cannot last. Remember the cake stand, icon of our recent holiday weather?

Beneath those many inches of snow and ice the same forces of evil that pot-hole winter roads cracked and gnawed my birdbath to the point that it no longer holds water. The slightest touch, or breeze, causes further crumbling. I have to chase birds away from it. Hey, Finch! Don’t touch my birdbath!

I hope to be able to preserve Mr. Frog. Perhaps a very clever hammer blow will liberate him. I’ll take him indoors where he can join the Wood Duck on the mantle. The remains of the birdbath will gradually erode away, joining the soil, changing the pH in a positive way. (It was a very positive birdbath.)

Birdbath amid vernal plenty, long before the cold.