4.2.09

The weaver is dressing and sees a pileated woodpecker draped in cheerful light on a near tree. She freezes and watches for a while, then thinks of binoculars, tries pulling her clothes on without breaking her gaze toward the bird's big head with its red-orange blaze and stark white-on-black stripes, gives up, finishes dressing, and goes to fetch the binoculars. When she gets back to the window the woodpecker has moved to a different tree and is moving up and down a vertical trunk. She hears it call and then sees a different woodpecker, smaller, very close to the pileated. Through the binocs she notes its red head and zebra back, then fetches a field guide and finds it under red-bellied woodpecker. The pileated is gone. But a third woodpecker, smaller still, is flicking among higher branches of the same tree, and she spends some time focusing and chasing it with her lenses and looking it up in the field guide (downy or hairy) before seeing the pileated again, looming in the background of the magnified image, feeding in a tree behind the one she's focused on, its broad back and axlike movements partially visible, like an enormous gliding ship glimpsed between buildings at the end of a street.