Illustration by Lori LaBissoniere O’Neil
There’s not much to do where we live, on the western flank of Oregon’s Mt. Hood, besides immerse ourselves in Nature, which is why we live here. So my wife Lori and I had been watching a red-breasted sapsucker prospect our backyard trees lately, especially the dead Douglas-fir trunks that stand like old columns surrounded by living green — think Roman ruins in modern-day Rome. When we had the skeletal snag trees removed, we kept the bug-infested trunks twenty-feet tall for birds like red-breasted sapsuckers, of the woodpecker family. They serve as natural bird feeders.
The sapsucker would flit from trunk to trunk — a white/black/red rush in flight, then a ravishing spot of vermilion poking around the Doug-firs’ furrowed bark. We always stopped to watch. Peck at a tree, scurry up or around it, peck some more. They’re always busy. A few times I saw a pair of sapsuckers chase each other in flight through the trees, making distinct calls like I hadn’t heard before. The sapsuckers were welcome here, a part of our mountain backyard community, a distinguished bird whose looks, work, and rarity made the robins and thrushes seem common, exurban. Only the songbirds could compete.
At home the other evening, I noticed a radiant yellow-gold light on a row of evergreens in the late afternoon sun, backdropped by the high ridge and wooded slope that glowed golden-green in the warm June air. I ran to grab my camera, took a shot from behind the gate, and realized I needed to crop the road from the picture. Passing through the gate I saw a small object in the very middle of the road, on the double yellow lines. My eyes picked up red, and some mottled mix of black and white. I walked to it and confirmed my worst-case hunch. A sapsucker. Just earlier that day Lori had shown it to her friend as it hunted for lunch, and they joked it reminded them of a red-headed friend of theirs. No blood, no loose feathers, but its head no longer shone vermilion, just a mute red. The life had left even the color.
Salmon and other animals lose radiance just after they die, and I hear human eyes fade, too. The bird looked shriveled, its three colors less distinct from one another, like a tangled mess with red at the top. No backwoods rednecks had been able to crush it with oversized truck tires yet. Blunt force trauma, maybe from one of the many dump trucks that rumbled past that day. Or maybe from an everyday car or pickup. Bird numbers in North America have declined by a third since 1970. Busier roads probably don’t help. I lost motivation to take the roadless photo, and went inside.
I had to tell someone, which meant Lori, and she cried. But as we mourned a sapsucker I was really thinking of George Floyd, and his fellow martyrs, so casually killed by a cop. It almost seemed disrespectful, while people protested on the streets, braving tear gas and billy clubs, but I let her grieve. Our backyard is immediate and full of life — it doesn’t arrive through the news from some remote place, important as that news may be. A life like Floyd’s is worth many, many sapsuckers, as many as mine, but still we couldn’t ignore the loss of a bird who livened up our sliver of forest.
After crying, and finding cheer in our eleven-month-old daughter, Lori took a shovel and moved the corpse before it became a crusty, feathery stain in the middle of the yellow-lined road. She set it in the open, on the edge of the clearing across the road, so a vulture might make a meal of it. I wondered if the sapsucker’s mate would notice it there. I hated to think of the empty nest that night, or a half-full nest, and couldn’t mention this to Lori. Maybe it had chicks right now. But what about Floyd, his family, his children?
We were supposed to have dinner outside that night, after a sunny, seventy-degree day, and make a campfire afterward. Instead, we ate indoors, and the firepit remained dark. I didn’t feel like being in the backyard, which seemed emptier now, and although we didn’t mention it, I think Lori agreed.
We’ll get used to the slightly duller way it was before the sapsucker showed up. And we’ll see how long it takes for another vermilion head to poke around the dead trunks, to restore the local biodiversity and beauty. I know, it was just a bird. Lives like Floyd’s matter immeasurably more. But we live in nature out here, like all the other animals around us. They’re our neighbors. For us, a car-killed bird is like a dead pet. A new void in life, yet nothing as tragic as what the outside news brings us these days.