Standing in the rain in the middle of the forest. Individual rain drops tap the hickory leaves, then slide off onto my hat and face and then to the ground. I try to listen to the drops falling farther from me, but they become millions and blend into a low roar.
There is something wonder-full about wandering in the woods listening to a warm spring rain cloud moves across the canopy. Leaves seem lightweight but branches I walked easily beneath only a week or two ago now lay close to the ground under the weight of their masses of water-coated solar panels we call leaves.
A Red-headed woodpecker is digging a kids’ room in a hickory tree a short distance into the Couple-Acre Wood, where The Dog and I enjoy our wander. The tree may soon become home to a new family of young wood carvers. I keep watch in hopes I will one day get a photo of the new offspring, though grabbing a decent picture from some 60 feet away — the approximately height of the holes above ground — will be challenging.
The hole — several of them, in fact — was started by a Red-bellied woodpecker. The Red-headed fellow arrived until later. Apparently a negotiation followed, though I was not privy to the conversation, and Red-belly went in search of another site.
I don’t remember seeing a Red-bellied woodpecker until this year, which may have something to do with the species’ climate-driven migratory expansion. According to information on the digital encyclopedia, they once favored the southeastern U.S. states but have been slowly spreading northward the past 20 years or so.
I mentioned this to another bird watcher and he said he had seen several this year, but he agreed there were more than normal. Migratory expansion takes time, as does noticeable ambient warming, so a few more years likely will pass before we see crowds of the crimson-topped chiselers around this area.
If Nature’s summer pattern holds, we will see several Hairy and a couple of Downy woodpeckers —often at the suet blocks on our feeders —and quite possibly a pair or two of Northern flickers. The latter have annually nested near the edge of the Couple Acre Wood, and come into the adjacent grassy area to forage for ants and other bugs rather than dig in expired trees.
Every year, I look forward to watching wild critters raise their new generations as I compare their activities to those of us human critters. We too often lock onto the notion that we are “the only ones” but the instinct for spring cleaning and childrearing seems widely dispersed.
We have an electric stream behind our home in which various bird groups, by turns, take their daily swim and ablutions. But the stream has been leaking water from the otherwise closed-loop construction so just before the most recent rainy cycle, we turned off the electric pump and drained the creek.
Within a day, an annoyed robin began knocking on my window, chastising me for allowing the creek to go dry. Then came the rain and the mud puddles. When the precipitation stops I will have to re-model the creek.
Text and images ©2024 John Messeder. John is an award-winning environmental storyteller, nemophilist and social anthropologist living in Gettysburg, PA. He may be contacted at john@johnmesseder.com
what really gets me is- in every square inch of any piece of nature is a whole ‘nother world- repeating patterens and sequences and fractals! infinity on the smallest scale! raindrops become rivulets, rivulets become creeks, creeks become rivers and rivers become waterfalls! no matter how carefully us humans have attempted to recreate this, its never quite like the original.
Hello fellow pilgrim! I think you are correct. I am often amazed at how, if I have ever been to a certain scene, I can recognize it years later from a picture of part of it. Every waterfall does not look like every other waterfall. Thought there are scenes that look amazingly similar and their components may be of the same minerals and causes, the result is, to anyone who takes the time to notice, different.