The Very Loud Breakfast

There are mornings when the forest gets it exactly right.

Soft light through the firs. Moss holding onto the cool. The cabin quiet, the coffee not yet made, and Echo tucked into his hollow tree in a state he would never admit to out loud but which can only be described as contentment.

"At last," he said. "A quiet morning."

He should not have said it out loud.

RAT-A-TAT-TAT-TAT

Breakfast arrived at approximately six in the morning, and it was not Echo's.

A pileated woodpecker had located carpenter ants inside Echo's home tree. And once a pileated woodpecker locates carpenter ants, subtlety departs the forest entirely and does not return for several hours.

RAT-A-TAT-TAT-TAT.

"I retract that statement," Echo said, to no one, from inside a small blizzard of his own bedding.

He went to the door and negotiated, as one does.

"Could you excavate breakfast somewhere else?"

"The carpenter ants are here."

There is no arguing with this. It is, in fact, the entire argument.

THOCK. THOCK. THOCK.

Echo returned to bed under the theory that the situation might resolve itself. It did not. What it did instead was move around to the wall directly behind his pillow.

"My bedroom has become a drum."

This is not hyperbole, and it is worth understanding why. A pileated woodpecker delivers blows at something like fifteen strikes per second, and a hollow tree is not a wall — it's a resonating chamber. The bird isn't hammering at the tree so much as playing it. Anyone living inside is, acoustically speaking, inside the instrument.

Which is roughly when Otto showed up, field notes already open, delighted.

Otto Is Having a Wonderful Time

"A pileated woodpecker! They carve deep rectangular holes to reach carpenter ants."

"Please admire it more quietly."

But Otto was correct on the facts, as he annoyingly often is. Pileated woodpeckers are the big ones — crow-sized, with a flaming red crest and a bill built like a chisel. They're the birds most people picture when they picture a woodpecker, largely because a cartoon was based on one.

The rectangular hole is their signature. Most woodpeckers drill round; pileateds excavate long vertical rectangles, sometimes deep enough to see daylight through the far side of a limb. They're following carpenter ant galleries, which run in straight lines through the wood, and the hole takes the shape of the tunnel system underneath. If you find a rectangular excavation in a dead trunk, you have found a pileated woodpecker's dining record.

To Echo, this is vandalism with feathers.

To Otto, it is breakfast science.

The Case for the Prosecution's Witness

Here's the part Echo was not in the mood to hear.

Those holes look like damage, and from inside the tree they certainly sound like damage, but the woodpecker is usually a symptom rather than a cause. Pileateds go after wood that already has an ant colony in it, which means it was already dead, dying, or well along in the decay process. The bird isn't killing the tree. The bird is reading it.

And then it does something useful. The cavities pileateds carve get used by everything that can't excavate its own — owls, wood ducks, flying squirrels, bats, swifts. A pileated woodpecker will typically abandon a nest cavity after a single season, and there is a queue waiting. Ecologists call them keystone excavators, which is a formal way of saying that a lot of other animals' housing depends on a bird that never intended to build any of it.

So the dead limbs and snags that look like the untidy parts of a forest are the parts doing the most work. A tidy forest is a forest with nowhere for anyone to live.

This is all easier to appreciate when the habitat in question is not also your bedroom wall.

Got One

"Got one," the woodpecker reported.

"Excellent. Breakfast is over."

It was not over. It was, at best, one ant into a colony numbering in the thousands.

Echo made the only rational call available to a bird whose house had become a percussion instrument: he packed a pillow and left.

"I'm sleeping at your cabin."

"I'll put the kettle on."

Behind them, the tree kept ringing.

Otto's Field Note: Pileated woodpeckers excavate large, distinctly rectangular holes hunting carpenter ants in dead and decaying wood. The hammering carries a long way, especially through hollow trunks. If you hear heavy, deliberate knocking in the woods, it isn't construction.

It's breakfast.

Comic Moral: Never assume a quiet morning belongs to you. Especially if you live in a tree.