Bent's account goes on to quote a particularly vivid description given by Ernest Waters Vickers in 1915 of "the masterly roll of the great log-cock:"

"This roll is composed of twelve strokes or blows, forming an ascending and descending climax; increasing in rapidity and volume to the middle and dying in force and rapidity just as it began. . . . I [once] heard one drumming . . . on a sounding board of peculiar musical resonance and power to carry . . . This old sounding-board was the hollow limb or arm of a big tulip tree or 'white wood' flung out at right angle from the trunk 60 or 70 feet from the ground, a mere shell as appeared . . . sound and hard and barkless. The spot where he hammered was white where the weathered gray fibers had been beaten off by constant use . . . That April day . . . he sat upright upon the limb grasping it firmly . . . and poising himself, making a motion or two as a neat penman about to begin writing starts with a preliminary flourish, struck the limb somewhat lightly at first and deliberately, accelerating both speed and power, diminishing to stop as he started. He then paused to listen to the effect, attend to the echoes, or wait for the response of his mate perhaps, which occasionally rolled back from somewhere away east in the woods. He would hop about a trifle, cock his head examining his neighborhood a little, dress his feathers or search for parasites - but not for long did he forget what he was there for; then gather himself up for another reverberation. With such energy did he hammer that his whole body shook and his wings quivered. He fairly hurled himself wildly at it. The great loose hair-like scarlet crest flowed in the sun and his scarlet moustache added to his noble and savage appearance."^[4]

The sound of a pileated woodpecker excavating a hole or foraging for food can also be loud and dramatic. The first time I ever saw one, many years ago, it was this sound that first got my attention. My husband and I had recently moved into a little house in the country shaded by several large old oaks. Early one Sunday morning we were awakened by what sounded like the blows of an axe attacking the roof above us. We had no idea what it was - and were completely amazed and fascinated when we rushed outside and found two big black birds with flaming red crests whacking away at a big oak branch hanging right over the roof, and over our bedroom. I wasn't a birdwatcher then, and had hardly ever noticed birds at all. This was one of the first experiences that opened my eyes to the wonders of the natural world. I had not ever thought that such exotic creatures might exist right outside my own door.

The woods around my home then, as now, were rough, second-growth woods that had grown up over several decades on abandoned farm land. They bore little resemblance to the magnificent forests that would have characterized this landscape three centuries ago, when European settlers first arrived. When those forests were logged and cleared, Pileated Woodpeckers, along with many other woodland species, also disappeared, or nearly so. But as forests began to return to large areas of eastern North America during the second half of the 20th century, pileated woodpeckers also began to return, and today they are fairly widespread.

It is critical to remember, however, that a pileated woodpecker is a forest-loving bird. Today, large areas of wooded land in the Southeast and in other parts of its range are being lost again - fragmented and replaced by subdivisions, shopping malls and other kinds of suburban development. Although they're adaptable enough to thrive in less than pristine conditions, they still require relatively large areas of contiguous forest with trees that are old enough and big enough to provide roosting and nesting space. They are not currently listed as threatened or endangered, but as existing forests become a patchwork of smaller woodlands or disappear entirely, there is some concern for their fate. Because much of the habitat they depend on today is generally not considered rare or glamorous, it may be lost again before we know it.

Though pileated woodpeckers often are flamboyant in appearance and behavior, at times they can be surprisingly quiet. It's very possible to walk through a woodland where they live without being aware of their presence.

One morning in early August, in a clearing behind our home, I was standing under a big red oak on the edge of the woods. Thick-trunked and massive, it looked ancient. Its largest, lower limbs were gnarled, like arthritic hands, and many limbs were dead, some nothing more than broken-off stumps. Nevertheless, the tree still looked strong and had a dense growth of pale green spiked leaves that clattered in the breeze with some of the spritely laughter that characterizes younger red oaks. I heard a dull knocking and was surprised when I looked up and saw a pileated woodpecker high on a dead limb. The knocking was not the loud, hard, axe-like sounds a pileated often makes, maybe because it was working on a soft dead limb.

When I first saw him, he was completely upside down under the limb. What I saw was a broad black back like a cape, and the red flame-shaped crest bobbing up and down, and gray clawed feet gripping the black bark of the oak. I watched him for a long time, even though it meant standing with my head bent back uncomfortably because he was almost straight above me. His full red crest, covering all of the crown, looked almost translucent, watercolor red through my binoculars. Without them, it looked like a bright flame burning against the black and green of the oak. The whole time I watched him, off and on for more than an hour, he never called out, never trumpeted or clucked or made any sound except for the dull, steady thunk of his bill on the limb. He worked intently on one spot for a long time. First he was under it, upside down. Then he moved to the top of the limb, and it was from that angle that I could get a better look at him. His long neck moved like a snake, his head swung back and then forward and straight down, striking the branch and sending showers of bark and wood down around me. Then his head twisted and turned to get the long bill into crevices, digging into the wood and apparently eating what he found there, though I could not see the long, sticky barbed tongue that allows a pileated woodpecker to reach the ants, beetles and larvae that make up most of its diet.

After a while, he rested. He sat on top of the limb, exactly where he had been working, and sort of sunk down onto it. He preened, then sat with wings spread low across the limb, and looked around, sometimes raising his head in a way that made me think he was about to fly. But he didn't. After several minutes, he went quietly back to work. Finally, to give my neck a rest, I walked away, down the path and through the woods to the wetland. When I came back about an hour later, he was still there in the same tree, though now on a different limb on the opposite side, still knocking steadily and feeding.

The contrast between this incident and the one when the two wildly expressive woodpeckers surprised me at the beaver pond illustrates the somewhat paradoxical character and behavior of a pileated woodpecker. It's a large, colorful, dramatic-looking bird, often loud and flamboyant when we see it. Perhaps most of the time, however, it is secretive and surprisingly unobtrusive. It can appear majestic and regal at times, but in other situations can look and sound awkward, comical or bizarre. Some of this depends on the point of view of the observer, of course, but I also think these different faces reflect something important about a Pileated Woodpecker: It's wild. It may be familiar in many ways, but it's not entirely predictable, and there's much about its life and character we do not yet know.

"It is . . . a wary creature," Bent wrote, "and is not easily stalked. On one occasion, when I had successfully approached a male that was idling in the top of a gaunt chestnut near the nesting tree, I paused . . . until the bird should sidle around the limb. Even so, he was quicker than I; for, before I had completed my movement, he was peering from the opposite side, and detecting me, was off."

"It is . . . adept at keeping out of sight behind a tree trunk . . . and will lead a hunter a long chase by flying from tree to tree well in advance of him. When shot dead, it may cling for some time to the branch or trunk, until its muscles relax and allow it to fall. If wounded, it keeps up a constant chatter while falling and will not become quiet while life remains; a wounded bird should be handled carefully, for it can inflict a painful wound with its powerful beak."^[5]

Pileated woodpeckers are thought to be monogamous and to mate for life. A pair defends its territory year-round, and over the years will excavate a number of cavities for nesting and roosting - sometimes returning year after year to the same favorite old tree. The site chosen is typically a large dead tree deep in the forest, often in a bottomland, near a stream or wetland. A series of beaver ponds like the ones on the edge of our woodland, with many dead and dying trees around them, provided pretty good habitat for them. Pine, oak, hickory, beech, tulip poplar, and hemlock are among the many species they've been known to use for nests.

As a rule, a new nest hole is excavated every year. When finished it has a circular or somewhat triangular opening, and is lined in the bottom with wood chips before the female lays her eggs. A pair often starts work on several different holes before one is finally chosen for the nest, and these extra holes - as well as nest holes used in earlier years - may be used for roosting, or used by other wildlife species, including birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, insects and spiders. White-footed mice, flying squirrels, owls, and tree-nesting ducks are among the species Bent mentions having found in holes created by pileated woodpeckers, and once, "tucked in the niche formed by a great furrowlike incision in the bole of a basswood tree, and about 10 feet from the ground, I . . . found a nest of the olive-backed thrush."^[6]

The presence of pileated woodpeckers in the southern woodland around our home was one sign that this rough, young second-growth forest was home to a fairly healthy community of wildlife species. Over the past ten years, however, the woods that surrounded our home have shrunk considerably, as several new subdivisions have been built or begun - cutting into the woods and breaking them up into a smaller and smaller, patchier pattern. At some point, it seems inevitable that this woodland community will be so fragmented it will no longer exist as anything like a real forest, and when that happens, many of the species that depend on this habitat will have to find other forest homes - if they can.

An ivory-billed woodpecker must be a magnificent bird, and I hope that one of these days we'll find they continue to exist in some deep pocket of wilderness. But we know that pileated woodpeckers live here now, and they, too, are magnificent birds. It would be a shame beyond measure to wake up one day or one year and find that they, too, have faded into the mists of the past. The question is - can we learn to value a species like pileated woodpeckers before they are on the brink of disappearing? Before they are rare or endangered?

Writing in Audubon magazine in 2005, journalist Frances Backhouse expressed hope that maybe we can. While the two woodpeckers are so similar in appearance and sightings of both can be spectacular, she noted, "somehow there is a tendency to take [pileated woodpeckers] for granted, especially where they are relatively numerous and regularly seen. . . . [but] the fate of the one gives us all the more reason to treasure each sighting of the other, whether it's in the wilderness or in a wooded urban enclave, perhaps near you - a startlingly large, black woodpecker swooping through the trees, its red crest burning like a flame and kindling our imaginations."^[7]

The key to ensuring that pileated woodpeckers and other woodland species continue to exist is to protect - and to restore - the natural habitat they need. In an article in The Auk in 2006, Jerome Jackson concluded: "We should continue to pursue Ivory-billed Woodpeckers across the Southeast, encouraging systematic search efforts in the best habitats available. But more importantly, we should refocus our attention on the grandeur of old-growth forests and the importance of those forests to migrant songbirds, wintering waterfowl, black bears . . . and a multitude of less-charismatic plants and animals.

"In restoring and maintaining these ecosystems, we will provide a richer world for ourselves and hope for the future . . . Together, with understanding, we can foster the healing of ecosystems. They have scars from our actions, but they may once again function to sustain the species that remain.^[8]

Late in the afternoon, on a warm, sunny day in late autumn when my husband and I had been working outside, the sun was sinking low, already below the tree-line, so our house and the small clearing behind it were in shadow, and damp, cool air had begun to seep in from the woods. Only the tops of the trees that surrounded us remained in its light. A pileated woodpecker flew quietly, with undulating flight and flashing white in the heavy beats of its wings, to a branch near the top of a big, nearly bare-limbed tulip poplar tree. It was a male, with a thin red moustache stripe and full red crest that shimmered gold in the sun. He sat for a long while facing west, sometimes raising a wing to preen, several times scratching one side of his head against the tree bark, but most of the time just sitting and looking toward the sun, soaking up its last warm rays, and looking for all the world as if he were contemplating the end of day - or maybe surveying, from this high perch, his territory, his realm.

It was not an old-growth, pristine forest, not remote, and not grand. But it was a healthy forest, recovering and wild, and given another 50 or 100 years, it could be even healthier and wilder and home to an even more diverse and flourishing woodland community. These ordinary, second-growth woods are the old-growth forests of the future.

As the sun sank lower, the pileated woodpecker hitched up higher, following the light into the very top of the tree, where he stayed almost until the sun went down, then spread his wings and flew silently down and into the darkening woods.

The species account in Birds of North America Online, provides invaluable, comprehensive information about the Pileated Woodpecker: Evelyn L. Bull and Jerome A. Jackson, 1995, Pileated Woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus), The Birds of North America Online (A. Poole, Ed.) Ithaca: Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

^[4]Ernest Waters Vickers (1915), quoted in Bent's Life Histories of North American Woodpeckers, pages 143-144.
^[5]Bent, Life Histories of North American Woodpeckers, page 150 and page 138.

^[6]Bent, Life Histories of North American Woodpeckers, page 151.
^[7]Frances Backhouse, "Survivor," Audubon Magazine, November 2005.
^[8]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.