My bedroom wall was vibrating. To my sleep-fogged mind, it sounded as though someone was striking sheet metal with a pneumatic drill in strident, staccato bursts. As the din faded, a second percussionist took up the resonating rhythm, a familiar rap on wood drifting across from a stand of trees at the top of the lane.
Only then did I realise that I had been woken by a great spotted woodpecker drumming on our steel chimney pipe. Peering bleary-eyed through a crack in the curtains I was just in time to watch its undulating flight across the rooftops.
Instead of singing, both male and female great spotted woodpeckers drum to proclaim their territory and attract a mate. I staked out the thicket, hoping to witness courtship behaviour or nest chamber excavation, but while I often heard the woodpeckers’ rattling blows high in the tree tops, their pied plumage made them surprisingly inconspicuous in the dappled shade of the spring canopy.
It was a chorus of squeaky cheeps that eventually alerted me to their nesting tree. The silver birch was well past its prime, its rotting branches bracketed with rubbery hoof-shaped fungi. The cries of the hungry brood were emanating from a neatly chiselled, plum-sized entrance hole three metres up the trunk.
A rapid kik-kik-kik contact call announced the imminent arrival of one of the parents. I hunkered down behind a buddleia bush and hoped that the adult hadn’t spotted me. I tried to pinpoint the sound, but the woodpecker fell silent as it neared the nest site.
There was a shifting movement through the trees and a silhouette skimmed across the sunlit asphalt. It was the male, distinguishable by the crimson patch on the nape of his neck. Alighting on the trunk, he flicked a glance over his shoulder before sidling up to the nest hole.
I glimpsed three red-capped heads pop up, wobbling on outstretched necks. Teetering on the rim, the adult stuffed a grub into each chattering pink gape. Satiated into silence, the chicks slumped back into the shadows like wound-down clockwork toys.
