Flocking Chickadees
Suddenly I was surrounded. I stopped, stood still. A flock of chickadees moved around me in waves like the sea gently moving towards shore. Several dropped down to the ground, others flew into the center of a small fir, others arched high into the trees — each one searching for a meal, grabbing insects off the leaf litter, the fir needles, the oak leaves, or the hanging flowers of the maple trees.
Standing still, I also watched a pair of Brown Creepers walk in tandem slowly up the trunk of a hemlock on the far side of the trail, feasting along the way. After reaching the top of the trunk, they floated off like flying squirrels down to the base of another hemlock, and again walked up the trunk.
An Ovenbird called from the distance, along with a Black-throated Green Warbler, a Great Crested Flycatcher, and perhaps a Northern Waterthrush from down by the creek.
I am reminded of how much we miss when we just keep walking…
Pileated Prospecting
Just to the left of the trail, before the wooden bridge that beckons across the creek, stands a tall white pine, fully embraced by branches of the hemlock growing right next to it. The crown is spindly but rises high above the hemlock, gathering all the sun it can find. The thick red bark is covered with gray and green lichens, the lower branches all dead and broken off.
At the base of the trunk lies a pile of wood chips. Above the chips are numerous holes — as small and round as a pencil and as large and rectangular as two hands stacked one atop the other. The holes pierce deep into the center of the tree, exposing its bright yellow-orange wood, making it easy to excavate whatever insects are hiding inside. Sap weeps from the wounds and drips down the trunk in long, sticky white waterfalls.
There are five small and five large holes on both sides of the tree, visible from either direction along the trail. Every time I pass by I see new holes, or deeper holes, and new piles of wood chips below — but I still haven’t seen the master craftsman at work. I wonder where he is hiding.
