Wings flash. Between this theater of needled
trees, the woodpecker cruises, its nose precise
as the tip of a rocket, red crest behind
sharp eyes fierce and jagged. It claims the deadwood
trunk, no longer a tree anymore, ragged
top blackened where its towering limbs were burned
to sticks, coals, and ash during last fall’s firestorm.
The bird remembers how entire leaps of flame
razed this ravine of hundred-foot hemlocks to
stubble. Following the lightning-born wildfire,
a cloudburst flooded the mountain with an inch
of rain an hour until bodies of fire
withered to choking streamers of smoke. Today,
the bird expects the devastated stump’s loose
and silvered bark to explode under the grip
of its talons revealing an insect feast.
The termite nation beneath has spent the fall
swarming the dead trees, mining their inner whorls
of pith, cellulose, and gum. They rebuild, reroute,
masticate, digest all the elements of
this organism in its rote stages of
decomposition, an upcycled fortress
within which they build tunnels, mate, defecate—
a palatial nest gifted them through divine
calamity. With its torpedo-like beak,
the woodpecker ratchets at spongey heartwood,
capturing entire precincts of termites. Those
deeply embedded brandish pincer mouthparts,
their segments quivering in self-defense ‘til
the woodpecker’s hammering bill-strike flays them
lifeless, proteins pressed into beds of dry rot.
The staccato of its incessant chisel
deafens the entire colony, vibrates their
resolve. Those past the attack perimeter
eject and tumble into the litter of
the deep woods, avoiding the terror of the
bird’s razor beak, the hostile penetration
of its claws into fragile pith where honey-
colored eggs in glistening clumps surrender
to the bird’s violent feeding. These insects
chance a soft landing in the underworld of
leaves and lichen that serve as a bunker to
regroup—subterranean reconnaissance.
No hard feelings, only heads down and queues formed.
There will be more eggs to lay, more fiber to
macerate in bile, chew into sustenance,
more crosscuts to dig, until this latest gasp
of a tree is nothing but sawdust. And then,
as quickly as it soared through this glen glowing
in amber autumn light, the woodpecker is
quickly dispatched in a seizure by golden
leatherette armor: the joints of a Cooper’s
hawk’s legs, a predator so swift in attack
even the termites do not sense it coming.
The stealthy bird noiselessly grapples its red-
crested hostage. An explosion then: feathered
underbelly from both birds floats like dead leaves.
Each levitates while the forest, as witness,
pauses to hold its breath, then each heaves a sigh,
a flurry of down over unsuspecting
exoskeletons. Stricken, the woodpecker
cackles its shrill protest until the hawk clamps
its claws around its neck, wringing to break red
into startled, terminal silence, sensing
an expulsion—of termite bodies and chipped
wood—from its gullet, a last guttering breath.
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