Woodpeckers

There is a certain fierce joy in watching a woodpecker work. The rapid-fire drumming against a hollow limb, the deliberate excavation of a nesting cavity, the patience of a bird who has evolved into a living percussion instrument. This book, written by a pioneering American ornithologist, invites young readers into that wonder. Fannie Hardy Eckstorm understood woodpeckers not as specimens to be catalogued, but as neighbors to be understood. She writes about how these birds find food hidden beneath bark, how they court and mate with behaviors most observers never see, how they build homes that will serve generations. But she goes deeper still, explaining the elegant engineering of beak and tongue and tail-feather that makes the woodpecker's entire body a tool designed for one purpose: to harvest the life teeming inside dead wood. Written at the turn of the century for children who still looked up from their screens to watch the birds outside their windows, this book endures because its subject has not changed. The flickers and sapsuckers and pileated woodpeckers still drum, still nest, still carry their ancient expertise through every forest where old trees still stand.