I walked onto my office balcony and peered three stories down, where turtles sought the mid-afternoon sun. They lined the edge of the pond in groups of two and three, their necks stretched to the sky. This view was my refuge, a sanctuary away from computer screens. But not a silent one. I was surrounded by the drone of distant saws and squealing brakes from strangers’ cars; dump trucks dropped their loads, construction workers their hammers. Day in, day out, the apartments across the street rose from the ground as an offensive structure of unfinished walls draped in yellow tarp. The noise was relentless, my curiosity, too: why build homes here, in this concrete wasteland?
I stared at the pond for some time, then turned and saw a feathered mass, lifeless, just underneath the rail. It was the second dead creature I'd seen on the balcony all year; a few months before, I held a perished dragonfly floating in a pool of stagnant water from a clogged drain. My finger shattered the wing.
Today I kept my distance. I watched the breeze ruffle the bird's feathers, illuminating shades of black, cream and yellow, a red cap and a red throat, a male yellow-bellied sapsucker. I had only seen these birds in books, never off the page. The bird's brush-tipped tongue hung stiff and sideways from a black beak that used to drill neat rows of sap wells into barks of a variety of trees, especially trees already weakened with disease. Oftentimes these sap wells become feeding spots for other creatures, like hummingbirds and porcupines.
The yellow-bellied sapsucker is one of the most migratory woodpeckers and can be found all the way from Canada to Panama and the West Indies. The sapsucker is an extremely rare breeder in Tennessee, as the state lies in the southernmost tip of the breeding range. The sapsucker today, then, was likely not breeding, but could have been migrating north to a place where it would.
The bird lay motionless while a fly, erratically exploring a limp wing, feasted. Every day, on roadsides and rooftops and deep in the woods, scavengers like the fly pave the path for decomposers, like soil and fungi, to recycle the carcass into organic matter.
The concrete ledge that caught this woodpecker made for a prohibitive death bed, so I gently nudged the bird off the ledge and into the grass three stories below. All that remained was a spot of grease, and a taxing question: why did it die? The placement of the bird, and the whole condition of its body, likely ruled out window panes, feral cats, wind turbines (not in Nashville) and vehicles.
A couple days later, I found out my boss had called building management earlier that week to remove another woodpecker. I watched the skies and searched the balcony for weeks after, relieved to find piles of dead leaves only.
The death of a non-domesticated animal, like a roadside deer or armadillo, registers and resonates as routine. Rarely do we study the intimate details, the flawless form that once stirred with spirit. The sapsucker corpse, in this vein macabre, was a beautiful thing--it stirred the suppressed science journalist in me and asked, What was this bird, and why should we care? What incredible feats can such a small creature accomplish, and how does knowing more about the bird impact our compassion and respect for the non-human world? I spent my environmental and literary journalism classes in college envisioning a future I was so certain I’d have, a career writing about rivers and mountains and researchers who spend their lives both above and below the sea. But I struggled for several years post-graduation pining for the feeling that writing really mattered— that a few sentences could evoke feeling, forge connection, and inspire action or thought.
The sapsucker reminded me just how disconnected I’d become not only from the woods and willows, but also from my journalistic self. So I've decided to start this blog to to muse and marvel, and to share experiences not just of outdoor observations but adventures into the wild. It is a project I hope will guide me (& you!) into the bizarre and exquisite world of natural splendor, a space that crawls with millipedes and scurries with mice, in mountains and meadows and forests and fields. See you out there.
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