As a sporting artist, I can say it doesn’t take much to inspire a painting: Shafts of sunlight probing a spruce-sheltered pool compel me to make mental sketches; likewise, dawn mists drifting ghost-like across autumn marshes cause me to pause in putting out the decoys. Never let it be said, however, that the ability to observe and analyze isn’t essential to the art of outdoors writing. Fact is, a fleeting sight, scent, or sound often is all that’s needed to put the word processor in gear.

So it was with this column. A week or so ago, before the snow arrived, I took my English pointer, Pete, for a run in woods handy to home. At the start of a trail that wandered through a stand of hemlocks, I heard the high-pitched staccato call of a pileated woodpecker, commonly referred to as the “cock o’ the woods.”

Directly, I saw the large woodpecker, a red-crested adult male dramatically marked with white, on the trunk of a tree. Braced by the quill tips of its tail feathers, the reclusive bird reminded me of a pole lineman supported by climbing spikes. The sighting also reminded me of the late Larry Beaulieu of Green Lake, who wrote about the activities of pileated woodpeckers on his property.

Because March is somewhat of a betwixt and between month with regard to hunting and fishing, as a change of pace I offer Beaulieu’s story – edited, with some quotes reconstructed – which I think will be of interest to bird watchers.

“About the middle of May, a pair of pileated woodpeckers showed up on our property. We have a fairly large lawn and a number of large trees, white birch and maple. Normally, these birds build nests in pine trees in deep woods. But this pair selected a white birch about 20 feet from our front porch. The tree is at least 25 feet high. The birds started drilling about 10 feet up the trunk. They took turns and were about three weeks completing the nest.”

Beaulieu described the nest as quite spacious, about 13 inches deep and 10 inches in width, with an opening about 4 inches wide. “Within a week,” he wrote, “the pair were sharing the nest. When the female was on the nest, the male fed her. Around the 9th of July, I heard young birds in the nest. A week or so later, I saw two baby birds, a male and a female.”

During summer, traffic on the Green Lake road is quite heavy. But according to Beaulieu, the vehicular activity didn’t bother the adult woodpeckers or their offspring. “The birds grew rapidly,” he observed. “By the 24th of July, the adult birds sometimes stopped feeding the young and tried to call them from the nest. On the 26th of July, at about 3:30 in the afternoon, the young female left the nest. The adult birds fed her and she flew off with them.

“Early the next morning, I saw the young male looking out of the nest. The adult birds fed him and then called to him. At about 10:30, `Woody,’ as my wife, Phyllis, and I called him, crash landed onto the lawn. As I watched, the adult female landed beside him and fed him. Then they both walked up the trunk of a large maple tree. Woody stayed in the tree about an hour before crash landing again.

“I picked him up and put him on the birch tree, below his nest. He couldn’t climb to it, however, because the bark was so smooth. Eventually, he returned to the maple tree, where he kept calling to his parents.”

Trouble was, Woody kept tumbling out of the tree. Concerned for the bird’s safety, the Beaulieus kept it in the house for two nights, feeding it a mixture of seeds, dog food, and suet. Eventually, they took Woody to the Bird Sanctuary in Ellsworth where he became fully fledged.

“They did a tremendous job of rehabilitating him,” Beaulieu wrote. “But we wanted to return him to his home. We released him on August 8th and he flew into a large pine tree on our property. About 200 feet from our back door was a dead tree with several woodpecker holes in it. Phyllis put some feed in the holes and Woody came down and cleaned it up. He forages all day in the woods and comes back to our `feeding tree’ for a snack before retiring for the night in his birch tree nest. I can set my clock to his coming out in the morning.”

Eventually, the Beaulieus were able to call Woody to them and feed him from a spoon. Unusual behavior, to say the least, for this shy bird of the shadowy woodlands. It wasn’t long, however, before the young woodpecker also responded to his instincts. Forsaking his nest, free lunches, and caring friends, he flew off to find a mate, drill a nest, and raise a family of his own.

In the interim, however, Larry Beaulieu took many videos and pictures of the pileated woodpecker that provided him and his wife with such uncommon observations and entertainment. Such interactions always make me wonder if the furred and feathered creatures that share their habitats with humans are actually wild or only afraid of man.

Speaking of shy, reclusive birds, no sooner was I thinking that woodcock would arrive here ahead of schedule this spring when Dr. Frank Gilley of Surry reported that he had seen a woodcock handy to Route 1 in Ellsworth on March 5. Usually, the lance-billed migrants don’t arrive until the third week in March.

Strange winter, wouldn’t you say? Flocks of robins played hopscotch on open patches of my lawn in January, sap icicles hung from the fractured limbs of maples in early February, now woodcock are showing up hereabouts. Smelts, alewives, and stripers will run early, for sure.

Tom Hennessey’s columns can be accessed on the BDN Internet page at: www.bangornews.com.