Pileated work, Mame's

Just to show I'm not superstitious, I went out for a walk on Friday the 13th, and coming back from the water's edge by the upper falls of a local wetland, I noticed a recently worked-on dead tree. This was clearly the handiwork of one of the local Pileated Woodpeckers, our largest woodcarver and the only bird that could do this kind of damage in such a short time. I'd walked this path a week ago and the tree was barely touched; this morning, the ground below the highly chiseled trunk was a carpet of wood chips, some almost four inches long. The Pileateds, which have made a remarkable comeback in the last decade or two, are adept at hacking away wood, dead or alive, in search of Carpenter Ants that make their nests inside tree trunks. Somehow the woodpeckers know that there are ants lurking within, but I haven't been able to determine how they figure this out. Perhaps the sound or feel of the initial Pileated excavations tell them to keep going. Perhaps the wood smells different if ants are inside. However the woodpeckers do their ant-finding, this bird, acting alone or with a partner, struck paydirt. Friday the 13th was anything but unlucky.

Pileated debris, Mame's