October 13 2016, Jamestown, Virginia. Two years ago, almost two years to the day, I wandered down a woodland path to Black Point here in Virginia’s Jamestown and there found myself in some kind of woodpeckers’ Annual General Meeting. Around me, as I recall, were Northern Flickers, Downy, Red-headed, Red-bellied and Pileated woodpeckers, wherever I looked were woodpeckers. Really quite sensational and an easy pick for a My Bird of the Day post. I remember taking many striking photos that day, especially some of the Red-headed Woodpeckers. That whole days outing was a success if my memory serves me correctly.
Today I walked this same wooded trail again, noting those same woodpecker trees although this time there was comparatively little sign of bird life. Little except, sensationally, for one Red-headed Woodpecker hammering away at a decaying pine branch very close to where I had left them two years ago; it only takes one Red-headed Woodpecker to redeem any number of other let-downs, disappointments and omissions so I was quite thrilled by it and I suppose it’s quite possible I was looking at one of the same individuals. If it made Bird of the Day in October 2014 why not in October 2016. On thinking about it, it’s quite possible I haven’t seen a single Red-headed Woodpecker anywhere else since then. I don’t suppose for one moment that it feels that same sense of Hail Fellow Well Met that I do. But there it is, I’m just another tourist passing by and we’re hardly an endangered species.
At the end of the trail, just out from the seriously eroding shore of Black Point, a scant hundred metres away, a couple of Laughing Gulls and a Forster’s Tern crouched atop some presumably once-useful posts. I took photos of them probably because I was feeling a little sorry for my largely idle camera.
Hitherto it had, as I just suggested, been a bit of a low bird-count day. Not that I was feeling bad about it, just that I’d made some sort of “Hmmm not so many birds today,” mental note. I’d spent a couple of hours poking around a stretch of shoreline which two years ago had been super productive but today only somewhat challenging: large swirling flocks of Tree Swallows trying out a dead tree skeleton as a gathering place, a patrolling Sharp-shinned Hawk weighing its chances of a Tree Swallow lunch and loads of Yellow-rumped Warblers chipping to themselves while working through the dense stands of Bayberry. Where two years ago I might have leapt easily across a small rivulet, today I wouldn’t have risked my life, those small trickles are now surging with out-flowing flood water. No complaints, just different.