When Nature Meets Progress

When we look around at all the beauty nature has to offer, if we are keenly aware of such beauty, it almost overwhelms us.  But along with that wonderment there is another side, a darker side - the struggle to survive and sometimes the struggle is in vain. 

One such example when nature collided with "progress" is seen in this picture of this pileated woodpecker, Dryocopus pileatus, which is a bird, to me, that epitomizes wildness in the woodlands and mountains.  It is one of my favorite birds. I had the good fortune a few years back to see two mating in a white pine in my front yard, then hammering out a hole in a nearby dead tree and raising four little ones.

The old people in the North Carolina mountains called them "wood hens," because their cry, they believed, sounded hen-like when the hen cackles to call its "biddies" to found food, but I have never thought of it that way.

If you are lucky enough to hear one hammering on a dead tree, drumlike, powerful, then giving that ta ta ta ta ta ta rapid scream which resounds over hollows and across ridges, you will know that you heard that same cry that pioneers and Indians centuries ago heard - know that you share, in a sense, a kinship with them.


Unfortunately this one met "progress" and lost. It made the mistake of landing on a power line near my niece, Carolyn's house. She posed it to be lifelike - a fitting picture for its obituary.

 I am not disparaging progress because it is an inescapable force that defines us in this age.  We are part of it and cannot escape it.  It would be impossible to live without electricity and other conveniences that we have long taken for granted.

At one time when I was young I entertained the notion of casting off all the trappings of civilization and becoming one with nature, a notion many of us have entertained, but later when some of the romanticism in me had died, I realized this was impossible.  We created this monster and now we must live with it or die.  It takes no prisoners.