Are your neighbors taking down trees? Salvage the dead wood and place it around your garden. You just might get a royal visit from a pileated woodpecker.

The chainsaws started at 7:15 on the last Saturday morning of March, followed by shredders at 7:30. It should have been a day of rest for us, but I was more concerned about the noise drowning out the birds, who were just starting to clear their throats for their morning roll call.

Our next-door neighbor is afraid of trees falling on his house, even though the possibility is remote. I fear the opposite: human households and developments decimating trees and taking away the bedrooms and pantries and rooftops of our wild friends. I also worry about the effects of the grinding, soul-crushing sounds on animals’ abilities to nest, rest and even hear themselves talk.

The weekend before had been different, a rare quiet moment when trees were too wet to cut yet and grass was too short to mow. That Sunday, the only traffic was at the birdbath, where mockingbirds held court as their more timid counterparts queued up on surrounding branches. Writing from a cozy vantage point by the front window, I looked out occasionally to admire them and take pictures. This has become routine for us, the birds and me, even though I’m the only one who knows it.

Just as I was getting ready to abandon my station, someone large and in charge flew into view: a pileated woodpecker. We hear him often. Once, many years ago, we even got a fuzzy flip-phone video of a pileated pulling apart a stump by the road. But I’d never had a chance to observe one up close. That morning I had many chances: The flowerbed near the front door would be just one in a series of stops on the woodpecker’s stump tour of our whole garden.

Those stumps were actually pieces of aging trunk we’d collected from another neighbor, who’d chopped up a perfectly healthy ash to appease a guy complaining about the overhanging branches touching his oversized RV.  Making the best of a bad situation, we rolled bits of the once vibrant tree’s carcass down the street and into our habitat. They stand as sentinels, protecting our milkweed patch from county maintenance crews, marking the entrances to paths, and creating pedestals for containers. Most of all, they feed the birds — and the fungi, beetles, ants, caterpillars and cavity-nesting bees who make their homes there too.

In our two-acre plot, pileated woodpeckers can easily find all the delectable side dishes on their official preferred menu, including the fruits of greenbrier, hackberry, sassafras, sumacs, poison ivy, hollies, dogwoods, persimmons, brambles and elderberries. But their main dish — carpenter ants — is also in abundant supply, along with beetle larvae and other insects, because of the dead wood we nurture.

Woodpeckers we have known include (clockwise from top left): a northern flicker, red-bellied woodpecker, downy woodpecker, pileated woodpecker, yellow-bellied sapsucker, and another downy woodpecker.

Last week, after making the final blows to his row of pine trees, my neighbor told me he’s spotted five woodpecker species at his feeder. But feeders are not what woodpeckers need most. They need insects for themselves and their young, and those insects in turn need dead wood for nesting and native plants they’ve evolved to eat. And without standing dead and dying trees — none of which exist in my neighbor’s yard — there would be no place for woodpeckers to excavate holes large enough to raise their families.

Though I may never be able to help some residents of my community understand how to be truly neighborly toward woodpeckers, I’m thankful they’re interested in being neighborly toward me—because I can pass that graciousness on to my wild friends. Just before the latest tree-chopping endeavor, I got a call from next door inquiring if I wanted any wood chips. Yes, please! I said, already making mental notes for how they would help me regenerate more woodland. Not only do I want wood chips, but can I have some of the logs, too?

Not for the first time, I explained the value of dead wood, hoping my neighbor would be moved by the story of a downy woodpecker we’d recently seen dining on branches lining our front pathway. He wasn’t, as far as I could tell. But at least I tried, and at least my neighbors have heard enough to know that I might be willing to pick up the pieces of the destruction wrought on our community of late. And though my acceptance of the shredded pine carcass makes me feel complicit in the tree’s untimely death, at least I can honor her memory by creating new areas for more plants to grow, thrive and eventually crumble back into the earth, feeding and sheltering more woodpeckers along the way.

(Photos by Nancy Lawson and Will Heinz)

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