Lookit This Tree
About seven months ago, I acquired a boyfriend. I mention this for two reasons: (1) to brag that an exceptionally good-looking, kind, and intelligent man wants to hang out with me and (2) because I just recently noticed something about this tree in his front yard.
I’ve been going out of the front door there a lot, through three seasons, and walking past this tree every time. It is not a new tree. His landlord, who bought the house in 2003 and used to live in it, stopped by recently and reminisced about how tiny the tree used to be. Now it is big. Its roots are pushing up the bricks that pave the tiny yard.
A few weeks ago, on a Wednesday morning, I was waiting for him to come outside and looked at the tree, and saw something I’d never noticed before: Two horizontal lines of holes. The tell-tale sign of the yellow-bellied sapsucker.
The yellow-bellied sapsucker is a cute little woodpecker with a distinctive way of eating. It drills a line of holes across a tree, then drinks the sap that collects, along with any bugs that get stuck in it. If you see a neat little row of holes like this in a tree, at least in my area of the mid-Atlantic, you can bet: that woodpecker has been around. (Other sapsuckers do something similar in other places.) The line of holes is one of those secret signs of nature that you see if you keep your eyes on the trees. Which, apparently, I had not been doing.
The tree grows in the middle of Washington, D.C., close enough to the U.S. Capitol that my boyfriend could hear the din of the January 6 riot. And, if he’d listened very closely, maybe at some point in the last few years he could have heard a sapsucker that stopped by for a meal.
Photo: Helen Fields, obviously