Admiring a Woodpecker’s Pantry

I find such pleasure walking in the woods. Pine trees whisper in the wind. The sun’s heat releases the smell of sap. Birds call to one another, sharing news of the day and the location of fragrant flowers, or defending their territory with raucous panache.

They also tell of this human’s progress through their domain, but I am only a passing distraction. Their primary task is foraging to feed self and progeny. For some, this includes stashing away abundance against winter’s scarcity. When I came across the tree pictured above, I knew I’d entered some woodpecker’s home. Each hole in the bark represents hours of work (it can take weeks or even months for a woodpecker to excavate a nest in a living tree). Each cavity here is the right size to store one single seed. That adds up to quite an abundant woodpecker’s pantry!

I wonder if this is one way the woodpecker shows off their skills. I also wonder how they prevent other birds from stealing all those seeds. Perhaps most birds’ beaks aren’t long or thin or flexible or strong enough to grasp and pull the seed out of the hole. I imagine woodpeckers also spend a lot of time defending this bark larder. It’s certainly proven to be a successful storage strategy, or it wouldn’t have grown so voluminous over the years!

There’s also real beauty and symmetry in this pockmarked tree. The woodpecker seems to know exactly how much distance must be maintained between holes for structural integrity to be preserved. There’s real beauty to be found here also, looking at the whole of the hole-filled trunk.

All this got me thinking about what I have stored over the decades. Food in fridges and pantries, certainly. Books on shelves and papers in file cabinets. Clothing and shoes in closets. I’ve “squirreled” away all sorts of interesting things in the files and folders on my computer.

I also think of the creativity and beauty I’ve encountered in human-fashioned wooden cabinetry over the years. Roll-top desks with various hidden cubbyholes and beautifully decorated Asian apothecary cabinets come to mind.

There’s also the invitation to repurpose—as the woodpecker’s done with this blank canvas of a tree trunk. It reminds me of friends who took home an old wooden card catalog from the former Benedictine monastery in Tucson when it closed. They use it to store all sorts of treasures in their kitchen.

What have you squirreled away, and how have you stored it? What beauty are you invited to notice in this process?