A pileated woodpecker in western Maine. Andrew Hrycyna photo, via GBIF

A commotion of flapping erupted within the trees along the sting of the woods where I used to be walking last week. Then what gave the impression of a forest war cry. Plain as day in an alder thicket 20 or 30 yards away, a big black body as big as a crow with a vibrant red head.

It was a pileated woodpecker.

It sounded the war cry again. That red top, vibrant and conspicuous within the tree. A chill rippled in my back. It was as if the bird desired to be seen. I watched it work within the branches. I wondered what it was attempting to say. Then it flew off into the woods. Loud and clamorous. Prefer it wanted someone to see.

This awestruck feeling on seeing birds is ancient. When Canada geese appear suddenly in a sweeping chevron a number of feet over the autumn treetops, a sense of tremendous grace mounts the air. The sweetness appears to be pouring into you. For all of the world, you usually are not making this up.

The anthropologist Frank Speck learned from the Penobscots that “the barred owl, diktagli, was thought to be the guardian of the camp,” and would warn of danger. Other native traditions hold that owls call the name of an individual soon to die.

We’re schooled to imagine we make these items up. Materialist science explains that feelings of beauty or portent are produced by neurochemical processes within the brain. I can understand that neurochemical processes are working. But whatever else is going on if you see the geese, it feels meaningful. The identical sort of inscrutable meaning of certain intense dreams. Whether the meaning is within the geese or in your head, nobody knows. Some convergence of the 2.

The woodpecker was speaking, that much is for certain. Birds speak. Whether it was talking to me, I don’t know. And even when I did know why it showed itself in those alders, or what it was saying, I’d haven’t any way of claiming it. Just some sorts of meaning are expressible as thoughts.

Toward the top of July this summer, the family gathered at our house and we were hanging out on the back deck, a number of feet from the woods. Kids were rollicking the yard, people were talking. I used to be sitting with my back to the door. Suddenly, there was a “thunk” behind me. I turned around to look.

A medium-sized bird was standing beside the step. It gave the impression to be happily inspecting the deck, unafraid of the commotion. It had the markings of a warbler, but seemed too large. We guessed it had flown into the door and could be dazed. But it surely didn’t seem flustered or frightened. This was pretty strange.

I began rummaging around for my cellphone to take an image. After I got back a number of minutes later, the bird was gone. It crossed my mind that it could possibly be an ovenbird, as I had just been writing about them. But that seemed far-fetched. Ovenbirds make a whole lot of noise — sort of just like the pileated woodpecker, in reality — but they stay secreted within the woods. Long story short, the Peterson’s guide drawing of an ovenbird exactly matched my remembered image of the bird on the deck.

A visit right out within the open of an ovenbird seemed strange, and one way or the other portentous. My wife, Bonnie, was very sick, though that day she was completely satisfied surrounded by her kids and grandkids. The stray, conspicuous ovenbird was unsettling.

In precedent days reading bird omens could possibly be fraught. The omen was not at all times excellent news.

“It was thought,” Speck says of the Penobscots, “that when a bird was singing happily it was an indication that somebody was going to die.”

Ancient Rome had an official college of augurs whose chief responsibility was to interpret bird omens, for higher or worse. In some situations, augurs could possibly be blamed by an erratic ruler for the bad news.

That’s how seriously they took birds. Nevertheless much ancient and indigenous people didn’t find out about neuroscience, they did know in regards to the natural world. More, in some respects, than we do, using the identical brains.

Just a few weeks later, early on the morning of the day Bonnie died, an unusual mixed flock of small birds was hopping around within the clump of young ashes and dogwoods just out the lounge window. I watched them while I sat holding her hand. It was hard to discover who they were, exactly. Warblers, some chickadees, a veery possibly, nuthatches, sparrows, what looked like a flicker. They fluttered and murmured on the market for hours. Their presence gave the impression to be speaking, but I didn’t know what they were saying. Until a number of hours later, possibly. Nobody knows.

Although you would like desperately to know, you don’t know where your wife went. You’ve gotten a sense, like the sensation you get when the geese swing flapping and shouting over the treetops, that she is someplace else. The neuroscientists’ story that she went nowhere just simply doesn’t compute, if you hold it as much as every thing you realize about cycles and nature’s disposition to reuse complex structures, and in regards to the feeling of beauty.

What you’re left with is that you simply don’t know and you possibly can’t discover. But it surely feels very very like every thing, here and elsewhere, is interconnected in ways there’s no language for. Sometimes the interconnections ripple through in dreams and in apparitions of birds.

The pileated woodpecker meant something.

That’s as much as you possibly can say about it.

Dana Wilde lives in Troy. You possibly can contact him at dwilde.naturalist@gmail.com. His book “Summer to Fall: Notes and Numina from the Maine Woods” is obtainable from North Country Press. Backyard Naturalist appears the second and fourth Thursdays every month.

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