On a cool, cloudy afternoon in February, I sat at the foot of a large dead pine on the edge of a beaver pond, lost in observation of a quiet scene in drab winter colors. Bare-limbed trees and dull gray shrubs surrounded the brown, still water. Pale trunks stood like partially submerged broken columns. Fallen trees, branches, root masses and stumps lay in tangles and piles around the edges of the pond and out into it. Four turtles sprawled on a log, necks stretched up toward the sky, where the sun broke through now and then. A kingfisher rattled. Southern chorus frogs sang, each voice like a finger running over a comb. A ruby-crowned kinglet fussed in a dry, stuttering call. A wood duck hit the water with a whistling splash, and quickly swam out of sight. Several more ducks followed, and disappeared into a stand of tall grass. At the far northern edge of the pond, to my right, four hooded mergansers - two vivid males with fan-shaped black and white crests raised, and two more subtly-colored females - floated in and out of sight, in a silent ballet of black and white, rust and gray.

I'd been sitting there long enough so that maybe I had begun to blend into the scenery, which was what I was trying to do, but maybe I did it a little too well. Suddenly, the reverie was shattered by an explosion of sound - the whup-whup-whup of large wings, the scratch of claws on bark, and a blood-curdling squawk - as something whacked the tree behind me with a thud and sent down a shower of pine bark. I jumped up - and saw a pair of pileated woodpeckers about two-thirds of the way up the tree above me, hitching their way downward on big gray claws and attacking the trunk with their bills.

Tall, broad-shouldered black birds with flaming scarlet crests that flared up into peaks, and ribbons of white down their faces and necks, they looked savage, half-crazed, turning their heads this way and that, showing a wild-looking eye, and moving in jerky, hopping fashion, snaking their heads on long, lithe necks. They jerked their way down and around the tree, striking it with ferocity, sending chips and slabs of bark flying. They made strange, broken sounds to each other, half-cackles, half clucks, and they seemed restless, unfocused, and easily distracted. After maybe five or six minutes, as abruptly as they had arrived, they left, one right after the other, black wings flashing large patches of white as they flew and disappeared into the surrounding trees, one of them calling - a rolling, extended cuk-cuk-cuk-cuk-cuk-cuk-cuk-cuk that trailed their path through the woods.

It all happened so fast that my heart was still beating hard from the noise and chaos of their arrival when suddenly - they were gone. I stood there, mouth open, staring up at the broken, empty, silent branches. A minute or two later, I heard a trumpeted, jungle-like call not far in the distance - a brazen, exuberant laughter that rose to a crescendo and fell in a cascade of cackles.

The call of a pileated woodpecker was not uncommon in our 16 acres of woods in Oconee County, Georgia. We saw and heard them often, though not always in such dramatic fashion. This particular encounter is one of my favorites because it was a vivid glimpse, in a few unguarded moments, of the fiery, super-animated nature of these woodpeckers that we too often take for granted. Pileated woodpeckers may be relatively common and widespread in the forests of North America today, as they were in our own patch of woods - but there's nothing ordinary about them.

Six years later, in April 2005, a team led by scientists from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology announced that an ivory-billed woodpecker - a close relative of a pileated, but so rare it had been considered probably extinct - had been sighted in a forested swamp in eastern Arkansas. This sensational news captured the attention of millions, enthralling even people who ordinarily wouldn't care anything about birds at all. It's an irresistible story - finding a magnificent bird of almost mythical nobility and grace, one that had been thought extinct. Since that dramatic announcement, four years have passed. Despite extensive search efforts, definitive evidence of an ivory-billed woodpecker has not yet been found, and the original sightings have been seriously questioned, with some scientists arguing that the search for an ivory-billed woodpecker diverts resources from efforts to protect and preserve other wildlife species and ecosystems in serious decline. Nevertheless, the birding community and others - even some scientists who dispute the original claims - haven't yet given up hope of finding them again - hoping for news of more sightings, more evidence to confirm that that this fabled bird of the once-great southeastern forests really does still exist. "We all want there to be ivory-billed woodpeckers out there," says Jerome Jackson, a leading authority on both pileated and ivory-billed Woodpeckers. "We all have hope."^[1]

Whether or not that news ever comes, most of us will never see an ivory-billed woodpecker, but it would be a beautiful thing to know that it's there, an affirmation that mystery and wildness still live on in the natural world around us, and have not been completely logged and plowed and subdivided and studied out of existence. Like countless others, I followed the story closely. I read every book and article I could find, watched interviews on television, followed postings on bird email lists, listened to reports on NPR. Following the story of the ivory-billed woodpecker, though, also made me think a lot about the pileated woodpecker, which comes off in most of the news reports, articles and books as a kind of dowdy, less glamorous cousin. This is perfectly understandable - pileated woodpeckers are relatively common and exactly what the searchers did not want to see. And yet it doesn't seem quite fair, and I found myself feeling defensive on behalf of the pileated woodpecker, a familiar resident of our southern woods, as well as of forested areas throughout a large portion of eastern, central and western North America.

I know it's only natural that we get excited about seeing something that's rare, and don't get excited about seeing something more common. But by placing so much emphasis on the rare and endangered, I think we're in danger of missing the whole point of appreciating and protecting what's left of the natural world. We don't have to go to the swamps of eastern Arkansas or to other remote places to find beauty, mystery and wildness in nature. It's still here, all around us - we just don't usually see it because we've been trained to think it only exists in exotic, faraway places. And while it's unquestionably and vitally important to protect the diminishing number of pristine and endangered places, animals and plants, our celebrity-cult approach to Nature too often blinds us to the value of species and landscapes that are not considered rare or endangered, spectacular or unspoiled. I believe this way of thinking is directly and importantly contributing to the rapid and devastating loss of much natural land today - and thus to the likely endangering and loss of more and more wildlife species. Our failure to appreciate and value the natural landscapes and communities closer to home almost certainly will lead to more losses in the not too distant future - so that many of the plants, animals and places we consider common today will tomorrow become like the ivory-billed woodpecker - extinct, or very nearly so.

A pileated woodpecker, for example, is a fascinating bird, as wild and admirable in its own way as an Ivory-billed. It's just not rare - yet.

With the exception of the ivory-billed woodpecker and the imperial woodpecker of Mexico (which is also extremely rare, if not extinct), the pileated is the largest woodpecker in North America, roughly two or three inches shorter in height and two or three inches smaller in wingspan than an Ivory-billed. It's often described as "crow-sized," though I think that's an unfortunate comparison, because its shape and overall appearance are nothing like a crow. With its long neck, large red-crested head, and long, pointed bill, its profile is regal and imperious. Bold white stripes run across its face and down the neck, contrasting with broad, dull-black wings and back and a long black tail. A small patch of white shows in the wings when folded, but when a pileated woodpecker flies, the wings flash large patches of white on the under-side. Its feet look reptilian, scaly and gray, with sharp claws. In addition to the prominent, clear-red crest, the male has a red moustache stripe. The female's red crest is less full, and she lacks the red moustache stripe.

The source of the name "pileated" has been traced to 18th-century English naturalist Mark Catesby, who called it "the large red-crested woodpecker." Based on this description, Linnaeus gave it the scientific name pileatus, (for crested), and later authorities, beginning with English ornithologist John Latham, turned the scientific name into the common name. Arthur Cleveland Bent, in his Life Histories of North American Woodpeckers (1939) described the result as sadly unimaginative. "The bird already possessed a common name," he wrote, "and it is a pity that Latham did not know it. In its native land it was, and still is, commonly called the log-cock. That is a good name - apt, picturesque, and widely used. . . . But Wilson, under Bartram's tutelage, followed Latham, and Audubon followed Wilson. They, in their prestige, have settled the matter . . . And now upon this splendid creature a dull piece of pedantry remains hopelessly fixed."^[2]

Bent goes on to mention a number of other names that have been used for the pileated woodpecker, including cock-of-the-woods, king-of-the-woods, stump breaker, wood-hen, Indian-hen, laughing woodpecker, johnny-cock, and cluck-cock. What I find most interesting about these various names is that several of them reflect the pileated woodpecker's most distinctive characteristic - the variety of loud, colorful sounds it makes, and especially its laugh-like, exuberant call. While the ivory-billed woodpecker's only well-described call is a sort of tin-horn keent, a pileated woodpecker uses a number of different expressive calls, and the one that's most familiar - an exotic sound heard in many jungle-themed movies - is glorious. Loud, bugling, and utterly free, a pileated woodpecker's call is one of the clearest signatures of a healthy woodland community. It's hard to imagine the woods around my home without it.

A pileated woodpecker may use this call to proclaim its territory, express alarm, or communicate with its mate. The other most often-heard call is a long loose string of cuk-cuk-cuk-cuks that I think of as its traveling call because it's often heard when the bird is in flight.

The calls of pileated woodpeckers seem to me to take on different qualities in different seasons and weathers. While this is more a reflection of my own mood when I hear them than of anything the birds may mean to express, it's also a recognition of how much we still don't know about their lives. On a fresh, bright, early spring morning, when the first green leaves are beginning to emerge and songbirds are returning from the tropics, the bugled call may sound joyous, like a celebration or elation, a triumphant call. On an early summer afternoon, when the woods are steamy with heat and humidity and bugs and vines, shrouding themselves in their reclusive summer mask, it may sound playful, mocking or defiant, or nervous, even truculent. On a foggy, somber morning in late autumn or winter, when the trees stand shrouded in gray, and wet brown leaves lie thick on the ground, the traveling, cuk-cuk-cuk-cuk call of a pileated woodpecker from some unknown spot somewhere off in the misty distance can have a lonely, melancholy quality. It's at these times, especially, that I hear the mystery within the call, and for me, it's a reminder of all that I do not know about these woods.

The forest around our home was by no means pristine or virgin. It was second-growth woods on seriously abused land, but it was largely made up of tall hardwoods, including hickories, white oaks, red oaks, tulip poplars, red maples, and sweet gums, as well as pines, some large and healthy, and a good many dead and dying. These woods were similar to the kind of woodlands that cover much of the land in this part of the southern Piedmont today, and although they were still relatively young and rough, they provided habitat for a wide variety of bird species and other wildlife. Pileated woodpeckers shared this habitat with red-bellied, hairy, downy and red-headed woodpeckers, northern flickers, and - in the winter months - yellow-bellied sapsuckers, each of which occupied its own particular niche in the community. It was relatively easy to recognize the distinctive calls of each species, but their other sounds are harder to distinguish, and I never learned to identify any woodpeckers for sure by their drumming, pecking or knocking - except for the pileated.

Like other woodpeckers, a pileated uses its bill to forage for food, to excavate nesting and roosting holes, and to make its own characteristic drumming sounds to attract a mate or declare a territory. "Commonly, the pileated woodpecker's performance is so heavy as to be unmistakable," wrote Bent. One observer described its drumming as "an introductory, rapidly given roll; then a pause, followed by three distinct blows."^[3]

^[1]Jerome A. Jackson, "Ivory-billed Woodpecker (Campephilus principalis): Hope, and the Interfaces of Science, Conservation, and Politics," The Auk: A Quarterly Journal of Ornithology, Vol. 123, No. 1, January 2006.
^[2]Arthur Cleveland Bent, Life Histories of North American Woodpeckers, originally published by the United States National Museum in 1939, republished by Indiana University Press, 1992, pages 140-141.
^[3]Bent, Life Histories of North American Woodpeckers.