Pileated Woodpeckers
The rest of a morning walk through the neighborhood was pretty quiet – though it might also have been that my mind was preoccupied with other things and not open enough to see or hear what was happening around me. I usually try to clear away as many thoughts as possible, and just to listen and watch, but sometimes I can’t get something off my mind and when that happens I miss a lot, and something pretty dramatic has to come along to get my attention.
This time it was the trumpeted call of a Pileated Woodpecker nearby in the woods. The first loud call was followed by a string of more agitated calls from two Pileated Woodpeckers, something like coy-coy-coy-coy, repeated by both and overlapping each other. I couldn’t see more than a partial glimpse of the two near the top of a dead pine, with several leafy trees in the way, but saw a flapping of wings and heard more calls, and then they flew again, further back into the woods.