Dire OD BON BUGLE TIN 15 
and I hadn’t seen the first generation yet. Invited to tea at the Bullens, I 
was shown slides of the Pileated Woodpecker, color prints of the Pileated 
Woodpecker, a firewood log — never to be burned — with enormous wood- 
pecker diggings in full pattern — Mr. Bullen pointed proudly to the ten-inch 
oblong hole. Mrs. Bullen related that just two weeks ago she had stopped 
the car, backed up, and sat WATCHING THE GREAT WOODPECKER 
hammer at a stump on the ground five feet away. 
I gasped in wonder. “You mean he was five feet from your car and 
he didn’t fly away?” “Imperturbable,” she lauged softly. “I watched him for 
five minutes and he never paid any attention to me. Finally I got tired of 
watching him and drove home with the groceries.” 
I was nearly hysterical. She got tired of watching him — and I hadn’t 
seen him after searching for five years. That was the day I said farewell 
to looking for the woodpecker. I crossed him off my list of things to do — 
things to live for. Everybody who was anybody had seen him. Seven had 
been reported in the Peninsula area when Harold Wilson led the last 
Christmas Bird Count. I would go down in history as the only person in 
the north woods never to see one. 
So this year, when Mrs. Huber, the housekeeper, said one noon, “I 
heard that big woodpecker knocking near here again,” I couldn’t care less. 
That bird wasn’t for me. If I had struggled for five years to see him, I 
would not see him in the sixth. Other things had made up for the loss: 
the flaming Scarlet Tanager feeding his green offspring in a tree by the 
car; three foxes and three raccoons eating supper by the bird bath on 
July 4th; a baby porcupine in the path of our car lights at twilight; Ruffed 
Grouse stopping the car in the morning; bluebirds and wrens nesting in 
houses four feet apart at the neighbors; Rose-breasted Grosbeaks feeding 
their young beside the window. There were myriads of wildflowers, 
orchards, gardens, woods, water and islands. What more could any one 
want? 
At supper, as Dr. Brookes and I were eating on the screened porch 
high over Green Bay, looking at the far flung islands, I scarcely looked up 
over my French toast and strawberries at the sound of a heavy thump. “Do 
you hear an animal knocking its tail on the steps?” I asked. She said quietly, 
“No.” “Well, something is slamming against wood. It MUST be an animal.” 
I put down my fork and turned around. In a flash the binoculars were 
in hand. A large, black, feathered tail was disappearing slowly up a dead 
hemlock. The birch tree was in the way. Hungrily my eyes followed the 
tail. It belonged to something big. It might be... It could be... It must 
be! It disappeared. Frustrated again, I lowered the glasses, then saw an 
enormous span of black and white flop down from the dead hemlock into 
full view. I beheld the spectacular red crest. Slowly the Pileated Wood- 
pecker flapped over a dying ash tree, careened toward the woods and 
disappeared. I felt fulfilled. I had a goal, and when I quit striving, quit 
fussing, quit trying to make it happen, it came to me — unexpectedly. 
Is life like that? When you quit struggling, fighting, trying to force things 
to happen, do the best things of life come to you? 
179 Villa Road, Addison, Illinois 60101 
4 fi fi ft 
