I LIVE NEAR SAPSUCKER WOODS, named after the yellowbellied sapsucker, a beautiful woodpecker with black and white feathers, red cap and throat, and a pale yellow belly. As its name celebrates, it adores the sweet syrup hidden below a tree’s bark. Each year, sapsuckers fly north when the sap starts running in the spring, and tap necklaces of small holes around tree limbs. Sap trickles down in dark ribbons. I’ve seen a bird visit its wells repeatedly, licking sap with a brushy tongue. In time, the tree sap scabs over the holes, and then the woodpecker taps another ring of wells above or below the first. A hungry sapsucker has left four necklaces around a central limb of my magnolia. I don’t know what magnolia sap tastes like; and insects drawn to any sap get trapped in sticky amber and add tasty slivers of protein to the nectar-like drink. Local sapsuckers seem to prefer the softer bark of aspens and magnolias, and bore holes in several branches at a time, in the process filling the air with drumrolls. They telegraph their whereabouts as they set to work drilling and mining, while also guarding their wells. Many species of birds wait for the jackhammer-jawed sapsuckers to do what they can’t—drill down to the fount of sweet flowing sap—and steal in to lap up sap and insects when the owner is working another claim site.
During the summer, sapsuckers wound the trees by tattooing one string of pearls after another. Sap is blood-precious to a tree, which thickens to seal up the wounds, but sapsucker saliva may work as an anticoagulant, allowing the tonic to pour.
This isn’t the pungent sap that maple syrupers tap in early spring, a watery fluid that flows up to the leaves at such a pace it’s easy for humans to cup. According to the Iroquois, a New York State tribe, long ago a boy watched squirrels lapping maple sap in winter and tasted it himself, delighted by the sweetness. From then on, maple syrup became a human staple. But maple is a harder wood for sapsuckers to pierce. Magnolia sap offers a rich enough prize. It’s small wonder hummingbirds arrive right on the heels of sapsuckers in the spring, before many flowers ooze with nectar, having flown from Mexico, Central America, and the West Indies—lands of sun, spice, and blossom—to the comparative chill of our summer, to breed and brood without breaking a sweat.
In my yard, the hummingbirds are partial to magnolia sap and have learned how to rob it from the sapsuckers. Phoebes, warblers, and other birds rush to the open wells, too, but the spear-toting hummingbirds attack all but the sapsuckers, their benefactors. And the sapsuckers employ the hummers as armed angels who keep the sap-guzzling heavies at bay. Humans have felt the same about water holes, the source of many a feud. If this is racketeering, it’s a widespread, ancient tit-for-tat that works. Nature doesn’t care if one’s annoyed, or how cumbersome the process may be, only that, ultimately, it wins.
Nearby, sitting on her well-camouflaged, lichen-lined nest, a sheen-green hummingbird waits patiently for the sapsucker to leave, then darts in for a snootful from the sarsaparilla bar. Only two hummers this year, and I’m trying to experience my disappointment not as anger or depression or I want, but just as one more feeling among the day’s phenomena: the sunlight shining separate lamps through the leaves of the magnolia, the buds atop a slender daylily stem, the house moaning when someone turns on the faucet in the woods, the glassy clatter of dishes being washed in the kitchen, writing in a journal whose cover is a reproduction of Hokusai’s famous wave, the rictus of pain in my neck, the steep plunge of my eyes down to paper, disappointment, the glowing patch covering a small hole in the window screen, how everything vanishes when eyelids fall, as though the whole plush buzzing world wasn’t, couldn’t be, hasn’t been.
The noise yanks my lids up again. Woodpecker dawns always begin with a loud syncopated drumming, reverberating around the neighborhood. Unlike a bird, I can’t pinpoint the direction of these drumbeats, some log-low, some rat-a-tat, all echoing like mad from the trees.
How odd that a group of woodpeckers is called a descent, unless one considers the lofty perch they once occupied in Greek myth. The witch Circe, who excelled at concocting magical potions and herbs, really didn’t like being rebuffed. As the daughter of the Sun, she rose each day with a boiling temper and had a bad habit of changing into an animal anyone who piqued her. One morning, she was gathering herbs when she spotted the handsome demigod Picus, a trickster she desired who didn’t give her the time of day. In a stellar fury, Circe scalded him with her wand, morphing him into a woodpecker.
The myth doesn’t specify what sort of woodpecker Picus became, but all woodpeckers are tools—tip to toe woodworking tools—with muscled neck, chisel bill, long sticky tongue of barbed hairs, thick skull, and a brain cushioned by a layer of air. Even the nostrils are a bristled mask to filter out wood chips and debris. The only reason woodpeckers don’t bash their brains out or concuss or pass out is because their brain sits above their beak on sturdy shock absorbers. But Picus was doomed to hammer trees at 25 miles per hour, banging his head all day long.
What stripe of woodpecker? Given Circe’s lust and spite, Picus may have been a pileated, the huge redhead that creates a racket excavating trees at dawn. One living in my yard has gouged big rectangles into both sides of a tall dead oak, carving its own private feeding trough. I wish it all the carpenter ants it can find. Its crackerjack blows carry down the street, and it nests in the tallest trees, despite the lightning hazard.
Or Picus may have become a red-bellied woodpecker, an altogether smaller gent with a striking black and white zebra pattern on his back, a blaze of red from forehead to nape of the neck, and just a smudge of red on the belly feathers.
Half past sunrise one morning, when the doorbell rang twice, I went to answer it and, finding no one there, sauntered back to my study. Again the bell rang, more urgently this time, but again there was no one standing out front. It rang again, insistently. Hiding, I watched, and to my astonishment a red-bellied woodpecker perched beside the door and used the bell as a “signal post,” bashing the metal button over and over to attract a mate, obviously besotted with the sound.