PILEATED WOODPECKERS  

There were four of us: My brothers Mark and James, Dave and I. Night was folding in on us and we didn't have a tent to sleep in. We planned to sleep in a shelter, a lean-to that the map said was in this valley, but all we found was a pile of rotten wood where it once stood.

We drew straws. Mark and I drew the shortest ones. We had to venture back in the oncoming darkness for the tent. We were not far down the trail, so we made it back to the car before it turned pitch-black. It was in the Smokey Mountains. It was summer. A park ranger came by.

"You're not going to hike in the night, are you?" he asked. We showed him the lantern we had and that eased his concern. He left. Mark tried to light the lantern, but the mantle dissolved to dust. We had no flashlights, only a box of matches. A light misty rain began falling. We couldn't sleep at the car, leaving them down in that valley without a tent, in the rain.

We ventured into the night. A darkness denser than I had ever been in before. Mark would light a match, giving a small glimpse of the trail for a brief moment, then the match would burn out, and we would stumble and curse. The small light from the match, that brief glimpse of the world as we knew it, the world of daylight, of sight disappeared all too quickly. How long did we stumble down that path I cannot remember? I'm sure it seemed longer than it actually was.

We eventually ran out of matches. We reverted to crawling on hands and knees in the mud, feeling for the trail like blind men, inching our way through the star-less night. We eventually made it back to James and Dave. We made it through the darkness, pushed back its thickness, its fears.

A decade later, after Mark's death, I remembered our success, how we proved to ourselves that it was possible to get through such darkness.

***

When I was a child, I used to watch Marlin Perkin's "Wild America" every Sunday evening. Jim was the beefy young man who would hop down upon anacondas and wrestle them in the mud, while Marlin would sit safely in the boat, narrating. I wanted to be Jim, the wrestler of snakes.

In some of Marlin's adventures he would show the use of radio telemetry, having Jim wrestle a darted African antelope and put on a collar on it. The collar had a radio transmitter on it. Then, Marlin would fly around in a helicopter with the radio-receiver, which beeps louder the closer you are to the animal with the collar. This way you can keep track of the animal with the collar, mapping home ranges and such.

Marlin's show had a definite pattern. It started off with adventure (Jim wrestling some beast), then some proclamation of how science was revealing crucial knowledge of wildlife (like a match lighting up the darkness of ignorance), and end with a warning (these wildlife species may soon be extinct because of man).

Maybe I became a wildlife biologist because of Marlin's show and especially Jim's antics. I was in love with his image, the ruggedness, the fearlessness, and in a way I have become him. The field biologist is the one who gets in the mud and mosquitoes and rain, doing all the dirty work, while the project leaders, the people with Ph.D.'s, narrate what the field biologists do from their air-conditioned offices, in the form of scientific papers. I wouldn't have it any other way.

My introduction to radio-telemetry was with pileated woodpeckers. It was my first job in the Olympic Mountains. The pileated woodpecker is a robust, redheaded comedian of the old-growth forests. These woodpeckers were fitted with radio-transmitters, using a small nylon backpack fitted over the birds "shoulders." I held one of these birds, a male, as the radio-transmitter-backpack was put on. He hammered his bill into my hand, drawing blood as bright red as his crown.

***

I once crawled on my hands and knees with a radio-transmitter, tracking the beeping signal through a thicket of young Doug firs. I found the pileated woodpecker tapping on a stump. I crawled closer and closer, concealed in the thick branches. I turned off the radio-receiver and inched closer on my belly like a worm. The bird was a mere foot off the ground. I could see ants crawling from a hole it dug, and the woodpecker was flicking its tongue out, lapping up the ants. It was a male woodpecker; the red moustache stripe was bright in the sun.

He stopped eating ants for a second, turned his head as if to look down at me with its yellowish eye, then hammered a few more times on the stump and wood chips scattered. This was the same bird I held two weeks earlier, the one who hammered my hand with his beak. I still had a small wound, a star-like scar at the base of my thumb.

Closer. I inched closer. I could have reached out and petted his back. The bird guides claim this woodpecker is only sixteen inches long, but it seemed much larger, gigantic in stature. I wanted to touch it, to hold him again in my hands.

I was only lying there a few seconds, holding my breath, before he raised his red crown, turned, and then I could hear the wind pushed by its wings as it took off. I turned on the radio-receiver, listened as the beep got quieter and more distant.

I knelt in front of the stump, saw a black ant crawl from the hole the woodpecker was drilling. I put my face next to the stump, stuck out my tongue, caught the ant and swallowed it down.

Later, I felt foolish.

***

The woodpeckers not only nest in cavities, they also roost there, sleeping the night in the centers of trees, hundreds of years old. The male and female both spend time on the nest, sharing the chore of incubating the eggs. The male usually takes the night shift, while the female spends the night in another cavity. She doesn't spend the night in the same cavity every night, though, she tends to move and spend the night in another cavity every five days. They know their wilderness territories like we know our neighborhoods and towns. They know exactly where all their old cavities are, some were old nests of theirs.

"It is crucial to find where the roost trees are," the project leader maintained, a forty-year-old woman with hair as red as the woodpeckers themselves. "This will broaden our understanding of habitat requirements. To find these roost trees, though, requires hiking at night. Are there any volunteers?" I remembered Mark and I, stumbling through the Smokey Mountain darkness decades ago. I raised my hand, volunteered for the night work. I didn't know why at the time, but I needed to go, to push into that darkness once more.

I went out in the evening and drove around the gravel logging roads with the radio receiver on, until I found where the beeping signal seemed the loudest and waited. As the sun set, the signal would move as the female woodpecker flew to her roost cavity, then it wouldn't move again. She was settled for the night.

Wrapped in nylon raingear, wielding a flashlight, I'd step off the road into the forest and follow the beep to wherever it would take me. Many fear the darkness and all it hides and indeed I had fits of fear some nights, as I splashed through creeks, thinking I heard steps somewhere behind me. Sometimes I'd shout, "Who's following me?" Turning my flashlight like a gun on the night. Did I expect to find some demon of mine shaped into a cougar or bear? Did I expect to see Mark, striking matches, illuminating a small circle around him, urging me to continue? All I saw in my flashlight, though, were devil's club and salmonberry, standing in their thorny silence.

Once, around midnight, I realized I was following a bounce, not the real signal. The radio signals bounce around in this mountainous landscape, making this technique an art. So there I was, midnight, nowhere near the bird; I felt a pure sense of lost-ness. Then, I wondered once again, if the cougar was there, just beyond my small circle of light, waiting for his chance to pounce on me. I shouted at the darkness.

Other times, I would track the beep correctly, find the tree where the female woodpecker was roosting in. I would walk around in circles, making sure the source of the beep was from the tree. Then, I would turn off my light, place my hand on the bark of the tree and try to feel her presence, somewhere in there, sleeping. I was not afraid. I had company, even if it was merely a sleeping bird, two hundred feet above me, but even more, I had a feeling of success, of venturing through the dark to the source. I still had to find my way back to the road and my truck, but that never bothered me. That moment, that brief moment in the dark, touching the bark of the tree as if taking its pulse, I felt a small flash of peace, like a flicker from a match, its brief burning, briefly illuminating the trail I'm on.

Maybe, some of us have to make peace with the darkness, to venture into uncertain landscapes, searching for a familiar-ness. Maybe, some of us have to step off into the darkest of nights, in a cold misty rain and wrestle with shadows that follow us. Maybe some of us have to physically take on the snakes and alligators, to force them to the ground under our own strength, to hold them close enough to smell their breath, so we can stare them in the eye, to simply know their reality, to know what's scratching beyond our small circle of light. Others who do not have these needs will mistakenly see what we do as bravery.

Patrick Loafman is a wildlife biologist, poet, and freelance writer. He has had two poetry chapbooks: "Desert Journal," recently published by Lone Willow Press, and "Song of the Winter Wren Poetry of the Olympics." Some poems of his can be seen at spirituallyfit.com. "Pileated woodpeckers," is from a nearly-completed manuscript of natural essays rooted in the Olympic rainforests of Washington State titled "In Defense of Greys." He has recently completed a novel entitled, "The Story and the Storyteller."

Contact Patrick Loafman at: ploafman@tenforward.com

May 30, 2002
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