A Flicker of Light

To be able to witness the domestic lives of flickers transcended any other consideration.
 

I. 

With its clean, freshly colored lines, the red-shafted flicker is a cartoon sprung to life. As if an endearing black bib and dark polka dots on a creamy underside weren’t enough, the males also sport a rust-colored cap and a malar stripe or “mustache.” In Arroyo Seco Canyon (“dry gulch” in Spanish), to the west of Pasadena, leafy deciduous boughs filter the harsh sun and give refuge to the red-shafted flicker—a subspecies of the northern flicker, Colaptes auratus. Here, as flickers drummed rhythmically on tree trunks, proclaiming their territory or calling out to kin, I might have been listening to the drumbeat of the earth. In birding, there is a forgetting, a coming out of oneself, while paradoxically also a going deeper into oneself. Standing in a leafy canyon, waiting in green silence for a bird to appear, my mind hushes to a whisper.

I had first seen flickers flying high above in the desert section of the Huntington Library gardens in San Marino where we strolled regularly. I had been denied access to the research library, but no Ph.D. was needed to walk on the grounds. At Huntington, the flock of red-whiskered bulbuls reappeared. In the hazy afternoon light, I watched the birds perch gracefully on palms and flutter through the desert garden. We stood among the barrel cacti, listening to their virtuoso cadenzas. One afternoon, two yellow-chevroned parakeets nearly collided with a clownish acorn woodpecker, who, shaken by the near miss, promptly dropped what it was holding in its mouth. I wasn’t sure how I had missed all this activity before. I had strolled here a couple of times as a USC graduate student, but all I remembered from that time was a mass of agaves and barrel cacti and jumping out of the path of a lizard or two. Before I might have seen a palm tree, but now I noticed a mourning dove sheltered in its branches, and around the corner a mockingbird whistled from a flowering aloe, and from the tip of an agave shimmered the throat gorget of an Allen’s hummingbird. One late October afternoon, a pair of red-shafted flickers flew repeatedly between two tall and distant pines and Michael noted that their reddish-orange wings glowed like flags in the afternoon sun.

The third largest woodpecker in North America, the flicker is a member of the Colaptini tribe of woodpeckers. The flicker isn’t all outward, dressy flair; the real astonishment is the bird’s courtship dance in which the male and female lavish each other with rhythmic, endearing head moves. The joie de vivre of these charming dandies and their laughing, kiyi-ing mews mingled in my dreams. One night I didn’t sleep at all; uncharacteristically, I lay in the dark, thinking through the night until darkness began to lift. With the first light of morning, I sprang up and wrote a story that came out whole. I wrote The Flicker’s Dance in a continuous fever; the screenplay tells the story of a terminally ill boy whose love for birds, especially for flickers, unexpectedly transforms the three adults in his life. When I finished writing, I realized with some shock that flickers had glided into my artistic life.

A few months later, the script won the Panavision New Filmmaker Grant and I wondered if I might get this one made. A casting director sent the script to choice talent— the actor Julie Delpy read it on a flight from Paris to Los Angeles and, when the plane landed, she called her agent to say that she was interested. The actor Joe Mantegna wanted to play the father and invited me to a lovely meet and greet at his home. A stellar cast was put together, but it was a struggle to get a reliable producer who could get the film financed. In the meantime, I kept a watch for flickers in the mountains—though these charismatic birds inhabit the suburbs too, when some semblance of their preferred woodland habitat is left intact. I found them foraging on the ground for ants, pecking insects or larvae from bark crevices, or excavating a cavity in a snag.

One morning, Michael and I drove up to the San Gabriel Mountains in the Angeles National Forest and parked our Honda just off Highway 2. An exposed gravel path led to a canyon below; the sun was beating down on the south-facing pass, so we didn’t want to linger. Nonetheless, I stopped abruptly. In a snag before us, a sizable cavity had been excavated, and a female flicker was perched beside it, feeding the three chicks huddled inside. All at once, I didn’t care how hot I was. To be able to witness the domestic lives of flickers—the weak squeaks of the chicks and the mother trying to divide caterpillars among them—transcended any other consideration.

Eventually we hiked down to the canyon and to the white ribbon of stream running through it. I kept thinking about the flickers but when we hiked back up to the snag, the female was nowhere in sight and in the blinding light the chicks could no longer be seen in the cavity. It was as though earlier in the morning I had seen colors swirling in a kaleidoscope but now I saw only a black box.

Whether they know it or not, flickers are generous birds. Later, other species of birds or reptiles nest in the cavities that flickers make. For this reason flickers are said to play a “central role in the ecology of woodland communities,” with researchers such as K. Martin and colleagues now recognizing them as “keystone excavators that may influence the abundance of secondary cavity-nestering species in forest systems.”

The North American Breeding Bird Survey notes, however, that flickers are declining in abundance across North America; a woodland species, they are sensitive to habitat loss. I began to admire flickers not only for their whimsical beauty, but also for the woodlands they drew me into. As the Cornell Lab of Ornithology notes, the flicker “is clearly a species of open woodlands, savannas, farmland with tree rows, and forest edges.” While I observed flickers carving cavities in tree trunks or making music with staccato drumbeats, I came to recognize that I was also falling in love with trees.

Old-growth trees are like pages of an ancient manuscript; when they are sawed down, it’s as though an earth-story is erased.

That summer we drove up to Northern California where we hiked through some old-growth redwood forests. On the aptly named Revelation Trail in the Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, we saw an unforgettable redwood. Two-thirds of the way up the immense, cinnamon-colored trunk, several branches were the size of whole redwood trees themselves. An entire forest existed palpably in the massive maternal redwood. With new trees that had branched out and grown from its womb, the parent redwood proudly wore a forest in its crown! Why don’t we let our trees grow old enough to show us such heart-opening magic?

In this old-growth forest also grew tanbark oaks, identified by standing under them and looking up to see the veins on their leaves. Maple trees with gigantic leaves, larger than your outstretched hand. A western hemlock growing out of a fallen redwood, its roots wrapped around the log, giving the tree the appearance of an octopus, hence the name octopus hemlock. The tang of a California bay laurel, also called the California bay or Umbellularia californica, its leaves long and elliptical and familiar, used medicinally by Indigenous tribes and reminiscent of Mediterranean bay leaves used in Indian cooking. This was the leafy hardwood tree I had mourned at home, in addition to the bauhinia whose antioxidant-rich buds are stir-fried in India.

A couple of nights later, at Lassen Volcanic National Park, we cooked tomato soup for dinner on a propane burner; while chopping wood, Michael chipped our new hand ax on a stone but we lit a crackling fire anyway. As we were pitching our tent, some movement in an adjacent fir caught Michael’s attention: a white-headed woodpecker, Dryobates albolarvatus, just above eye level. A member of the Campetherini tribe of small to midsize woodpeckers, this voracious eater of pine seeds frequents pine forests and rarely lives at higher elevations, among firs. “To eat large pine seeds, the woodpecker wedges them into a crevice in the bark of the tree,” the Cornell Lab tells us, “where it hammers the seed to break it apart.” I had never seen a white-headed woodpecker this close before. Dressed in a black cloak, its white-feathered head stood out. A prominent royal-red crown on the back of its head signaled that it was a male. It jabbed at the tree bark, then climbed and fluttered higher up the tree before disappearing into a grove of firs beyond.

Morning brought not the woodpeckers’ drumming but the scolding calls of Steller’s jays, Cyanocitta stelleri, and the tinny tooting of distant red-breasted nuthatches, Sitta canadensis. The eager toot of this little nuthatch is a joy to hear. Often one nuthatch is joined by another, then a few more, spurring a musical conversation. A brown creeper punctuated this conversation by adding soo-Susie-soo. Two white-headed woodpeckers inspected one of the young white firs that ringed our campsite. The birds’ brilliant white heads stood out sharply against the burnt sienna bark; they reminded me of Trinity College deans in black flowing robes. We walked over to two almond-colored Jeffrey pines, bark fragmented like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

“They’re like the plates of a stegosaurus,” Michael said. He sniffed the bark and thought it smelled like sweet butterscotch. I stepped closer, inched my nose to the bark, and inhaled. “Pineapple,” I said. Curiously, the Jeffrey pines in Southern California smell like vanilla. Seeing this commune of fragrant trees and the brilliant woodpeckers they supported, I reflected on how in the places where we live now there’s almost no chance of getting lost in a grove of mature trees. Old-growth trees are like pages of an ancient manuscript; when they are sawed down, it’s as though an earth-story is erased. The worn manuscript we have inherited is already riddled with lacunae. Must we go on ripping more pages out?

II.

My life was too modest and work-filled to travel exclusively to see birds. But when Michael was asked to visit Rutgers University, we flew there together and took an autumn weekend to revel in the Cape May Bird Observatory in New Jersey, a couple hours’ drive away. Near the lighthouse, we walked into a grove of trees and each time we turned around we found ourselves staring at a yellow-shafted flicker. Something was going on. A subspecies of the red-shafted (they interbreed where ranges overlap), the yellow-shafted comprise the northern and eastern populations of flickers who are migratory, unlike the red-shafted in the western United States, who are year-round residents.

Very early the next morning, we drove to Higbee Beach. Getting out of the car, Michael said, “Oh, look, a flicker.”

A yellow-shafted flicker was perched on the limb of a bare tree. Having seen several flickers during the previous day’s visit to Cape May, we had been wondering if we would see more. At Higbee Beach, the air was fairly popping with yellow-shafted flickers. For almost an hour, flickers shot by, traveling in bursts of about 50 yards. At any given moment during this flicker-filled hour, there were approximately ten flickers in our field of view. This was the big flight—autumnal winds reliably funnel these migrating birds to the state’s southern tip, and now we would witness their liftoff as they resumed their epic journeys.

At 7:20 in the morning, a skein of Canada geese, Branta canadensis, with graceful black necks and ivory chinstraps, struggled up into the sky. Large numbers of passerines—songbirds—were flying from bush to bush, and the flickers flew from tree to tree, while the Canada geese flew higher overhead. The wind was pelting all these birds, and the eddying gusts made it particularly challenging for the geese to take off. When the birds rose as individuals they became separated from one another and had great difficulty against the gusting wind. Coming together in groups of five or ten, they were still battered by the gales. After merging at last into groups of 20, 50, then over a hundred, the skein regained control. Over five skeins, each with over a hundred birds in a characteristic V formation, flew away into the violet-gray distance. The geese were migrating south, and the songbirds and the yellow-shafted flickers tailed the skein like colorful streamers. Our hikes seemed inconsequential compared to their grand adventure.

And yet, soon we, too, found ourselves migrating. Michael was offered a temporary position at Rutgers. In Manhattan, I met an experienced producer who took on The Flicker’s Dance script. The trade newspaper Variety announced that a studio led by an Oscar-winning producer would finance the film.

Manhattan offered even more concrete than Pasadena, but daily excursions into the depths of Central Park kept me breathing. I wanted to bring to life experiences in the natural world that I’d left behind in California so I began to work on a new novel, set in the world of birding. I would take long walks through Central Park, where I was surprised to find a ficus tree with heart-shaped leaves, the same tree under which the Buddha is said to have achieved enlightenment. I pondered the relationships between the birders in my novel, many of whom raced about to see as many bird species as they could, leaving only one woman to think about conserving habitat, while I meandered into the wilder parts of the park, where I might spot a delightful common yellowthroat or a reclusive black-throated blue warbler or a trilling northern parula. Central Park became an indispensable part of my life in the city and it is linked in my mind with heart-opening ficus trees and jewel-like birds who helped me sort the threads of what it means to be a birder and what it can mean to love birds.

III.

A year later, in what we hoped would be a final move, we migrated to Santa Fe and, at the same time, I traveled to an international film market in South Korea where I was invited to showcase the script of The Flicker’s Dance. In a hotel on the seashore of Busan, I met producers from all over the world and, after my return, the project became real: contracts were signed, lawyers engaged, the film was being cast, and a team of producers finalized plans to rent a production office on the East Coast.

Then the 2008 economic crash came, and the project fell apart, collapsing to the ground with astonishing speed. What had been something, what I had thrown myself into and seen unfurl into a sure thing, once again folded into nothing. These are the constant ups and downs of the material world that the Buddha saw through, and why he rejected the mind’s “fermentations,” its small and large sorrows, and why he sought instead the shade of a ficus tree. There wasn’t much shade available in the Southwest desert I found myself in, but the flickers stuck by me anyway. Once I settled into Santa Fe, they never again left my side.

In New Mexico even the winters are sun-drenched and if you plant enough native grasses, yards turn a grassy gold in October with a few perennial sunflowers still blazing yellow before the cold November winds hush them into wintry sleep. One winter morning, I stood at my kitchen window and watched a red-shafted flicker atop a telephone pole, nodding its head with a bouncy move; its mate responded with a similar bouncing head move.

“This is the closest I’ll come to seeing flickers dance,” I thought.

The pair of flickers wasn’t done. They slid down the pole and began to revolve around it in a fluid rhythmic motion while staying more or less on opposite sides. Were they playing or teasing? Their melodic mewing scented the air. No debutantes, these. They were enacting the dance of a married couple—and flickers are believed to mate for life. Hasya, the second rasa, is also known as the comic sentiment. “It can be shown through syncopated rhythmic patterns or an interplay of melody and rhythm between singer and accompanist, or between sitarist and tabla player,” writes Ravi Shankar, “causing amusement and laughter.”

As I watched the recital with the flickers mimicking each other’s moves, I felt my heart lighten. With an irreverence fitting to the comic sentiment, one of the flickers abruptly flew off to a neighboring pine and the other flapped away in the opposite direction and landed on a wire—for a well-deserved rest. I munched another bite of granola and marveled at their comic performance.

From my back porch I would gaze at a flicker’s streaked back while its bill probed between stones in the arroyo, so close that on its slate-gray head I could see rufous shadowing around its upper eyes. Flickers slurp up ants with their tongues and are capable of eating hundreds and thousands of ants, who otherwise love to trickle into the house in summertime. Their ant-eating prowess is a reason to salute flickers, if for some reason their arresting beauty or their rendition of the hasya rasa fails to move you.

Sitting with this tree, I thought about how life doesn’t have to end when it crashes to the ground, that an upward curve, a way of growing back up into the blue air, remains plausible.

One afternoon, Michael heard some fluttering in our chimney. Soon after, a flicker emerged, sooty as hell, into the fireplace; its red mustache was still clean and etched sharply, but the polka dots on its shirtfront were devilishly soiled, like a fine dandy with ash thrown on it. We opened the grate and the bird tentatively walked out.

First the flicker flew to the large rectangular west window, then, confused, it retreated to the fireplace, after which it flew determinedly to the right, into the round window, against which its bill thunked, sustaining a wound that began to bleed.

Dazed, it flew about the living room and perched at last atop a pistachio-green rocking chair. Michael spoke gently to the bird and he pointed out the door that led to the porch and garden. Amazingly, this strategy worked. With its beady black eyes, the confused, bleeding bird considered Michael, then pulled itself together and made its way out the door and to the porch before fluttering haltingly into the garden.

I wondered how it cleaned itself up after. From a northern New Mexico cabin, I once saw a flicker bathing in a puddle created in a gravel road by a summer storm. I didn’t recognize the flicker at first; its clean lines and dainty polka dots were blurred in the muddy water. It was such a delicious, anomalous puddle in the bone-dry area that two other birds waited their turn: a juvenile western bluebird, petite, with a flash of blue along its tail, and a stolid common robin. The flicker graciously concluded its business and hopped over to a nearby boulder to dry itself. Later that day I saw the freshly bathed flicker, polka dots gleaming impeccably in the evening light, scaling the trunk of a massive ponderosa pine. Though my experience in Santa Fe had shown me that flickers have adapted to suburban areas, in pockets and patches and slim corridors of trees, seeing the flicker against a ponderosa at a forest’s edge reminded me of its preference for woodlands; habitat loss has become such a crippling problem that even a relatively common species such as the flicker is declining in numbers.

In order to indulge my love of walking among trees, I parked my car as far as possible from the café I frequented in Santa Fe. Soon I began to see a downy woodpecker, Dryobates pubescens, tapping on a massive pine tree on Garcia Street. The most diminutive woodpecker in North America, the downy sports a vermilion hat that gleams in sunlight; a milky bar runs along its dark back. Its small size allows it to search for insects in places other woodpeckers can’t get to. Unlike the skittish flickers, the downy woodpecker is scarcely daunted by gawkers. Its breast hazy white, the bird would go on diligently pecking and drumming at the pine while I stood underneath and fragrant wood chips sprinkled on me like benedictions.

The downy woodpecker and its larger cousin, the hairy woodpecker, on occasion visited the prairie crabapple tree in my backyard or the Siberian elm tree down the street but I relished seeing the red-shafted flickers the most. One September morning, waking early to a cacophony, I headed straight to the porch. My eyes roved. Near the distant poles and wires were the usual suspects—mourning doves, robins, and jays. But closer to where I stood, beyond a mature piñon pine, I discovered two flickers bickering like an old married couple. Theirs was a substantial, sustained argument, which they presented to each other in guttural, ululating notes. I got so enmeshed in the intricacies of their argument that the bracing air no longer stung my bare arms. The flickers stood beyond the piñon pine where they had some privacy and they sure acted like they did. The matter came nearly to blows and the one who’d been in danger of being struck stepped back and flicked its wing in disgust. It occurred to me that they’re called flickers because of how they swiftly wave or flick their wings when defending their stance or territory. I hoped that come spring, the pair would make up and dance their enticing head moves again. The guilty party, speechless, moved away as though it would part and began to climb up the dirt hillside to walk off its steam but the nearly injured one couldn’t resist following and letting loose a fresh string of complaints. Things were at a dismal impasse when the pair judiciously took the only way out—they heaved themselves into the air and dispersed into its blueness. The very act of flying together seemed to bring about a momentary truce.

After a peripatetic early life, I wanted to put down some roots. I hiked out to see a 150-year-old cottonwood in a rare wetland south of Santa Fe—the 35-acre Lenora Curtin Wetland Preserve where birds and mammals suckle at a natural ciénega or marsh. The cottonwood tree began its life at a tilted angle but then it branched into three trunks—one straight, the second counterweight, and the third along the original tilted axis. The last trunk hewed almost parallel to the ground, until it at last heaved down to the earth for support, or to give up the ghost, but then, incredibly, it went on growing upward. Humility and longevity are braided in this tree but when I climb it up and down and sideways, I am surprised by how abrasive the bark is. I don’t think my childhood was tilted downward like this tree’s, it was unpretentious and upright. But for some cosmic reason, beginning in my late teens and early 20s, certain tragedies began to occur; the spiral of deaths and the barrenness I experienced in the years after made my life itself kneel to the earth. Sitting with this tree, I thought about how life doesn’t have to end when it crashes to the ground, that an upward curve, a way of growing back up into the blue air, remains plausible. I wondered if after the serious setbacks that had been hurled my way, I could live a life that was as resilient and rooted as this cottonwood’s. On one hand, New Mexico is “halfway across the country,” as the entertainment lawyer who had represented me in Manhattan sullenly reminded me. On the other hand, I was befriending familiar and new birds here and the iridescent air and vast skies had a way of soothing the soul.

Farther up the trail, among the green-gold cottonwoods, two flickers weaved, their rufous wings winking in the glimmering autumn light. The dashing songbirds I had seen here just two weeks back, the Townsend’s warbler and the common yellowthroat, had already left. Migration is an astounding phenomenon but it’s also a joy to have year-round residents like the flickers. Next week a snowstorm is expected and the gilded leaves will drift en masse to the ground, but the flickers will go on flashing their reddish-orange flags and lighting up our New Mexico winters.

Sometimes it is glorious simply to stay.