The Feathered Drum Majors in my Backyard

I am watching the woodpeckers  today. A nice tossy wind came through last night, finally clearing away the last of the leaves off the oaks, which now stretch clean and bare into blue-gray sky. I am always amazed to see their branches in full unclothed glory, the dark inky lines as intricate as capillaries, and — I know — as nutritive and powerful. It’s almost overwhelming to take in, even through a window, even with my feet up in my chair and a cup of coffee in hand.

And so even though the woodpeckers have been there all year, I am only now able to see them work. My field guide tells me all about them, but I have known their names my whole life: downy woodpeckers, red-headed woodpeckers, even the occasion pileated woodpecker, as startling in its jet black enormity as any predator.

Ted Andrew’s Animal Speak summarizes their central energy as “the power of rhythm and discrimination.” In European folk traditions, they were considered weather prophets and thunderbirds; in Greek traditions, it occupied the throne of Zeus, that most thunderous of gods. And as typical of the Greeks, there is also a story of an unfortunate human being transformed into one, as always the result of some ill-fated romantic situation gone wrong. The Native American tradition connected the woodpecker to the heartbeat of the Earth itself.

But it is their “digging in” that connects them to the oxpeckers who are their spiritual kin, not the drumming. It is their discrimination, their pecking in exactly the right way, that makes them a significant totem. Their skillful use of their heads reflect increasing analysis. Some questions to ask: Are you looking at the aspects of your life rationally? Are other around you not discriminating in their activities? Are you? Are you or others jumping into situations with little or no thought?

I watch the woodpeckers and the trees, and something else occurs to me — their relationship is symbiotic. Like the oxpeckers that accompany the rhinos, woodpeckers serve the trees by eating parasites that could damage them. Of course they can damage trees as well, if the environmental balance has shifted in an unsustainable way. That’s usually the human’s fault. We are such non-symbiotic creatures. Our parasitical behavior spreads around us in ripples. But a healthy forest will have both healthy trees and healthy woodpeckers.

How does the tree know? I wonder. To something so rooted and ancient, these darting spirits of beak and feather must feel so temporary. And yet ever-present, I imagine, and so eternal in that way. There’s always something in your hair when you’re a tree. They are as patient and abiding an entity as I can imagine.

I am less so. So much in my day feels like swooping, dashing, clutching, hammering woodpeckers, drilling yet another hole in me. And yet their Air energy is beneficial. It roots out the tiny harmful habits and grudges and buggy self-absorbed nonsense that is under my bark, concealed beneath my self-made armor where I can’t get to it all by myself. And so I should welcome the woodpeckers, their drumming and rhythm. I should let them do their honest natural work.