Separation Anxiety
It's hard thinking your children, or a Pileated Woodpecker, don't need you anymore.
(Listen to the radio version here.)
For weeks before my firstborn child graduated from high school, I was on a crying jag. Joe was in the drama club, and after their final performance of The Man Who Came to Dinner, as with all their plays, we held the cast party at our house. Embarrassingly, I sobbed throughout that whole evening. I also sobbed through graduation. Over the summer, the slightest thing could set me off, and I cried through just about the entire 7-hour car trip to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
I wasn’t quite as bad with my second two kids, but almost. I of course know perfectly well, and knew then, that the whole point of motherhood is to see your children succeed and go off to start their own independent lives. That wasn’t the part that made me sad. But their moving on to their own lives marked the end of a lovely chapter of my own life. How could that not make me sad?
There wasn’t a graduation ceremony or other big event to give me any warning about the end of another lovely chapter in my life—it came on quite gradually. Starting in late December or early January, BB, my banded Pileated Woodpecker, stopped coming to my yard every day. Then he arrived with a female on January 8, which seemed auspicious.
That was a full 3 1/2 months earlier than he’d shown up with a mate in 2022…
… and 2 1/2 months earlier than last year.
Coming with a mate so much earlier this year was probably due to the exceptionally mild winter. But after that, he started coming here less and less until, suddenly, he wasn’t coming at all. That’s never happened in the dead of winter before.
Russ and I got home from Hawaiʻi on March 12, and I watched for BB pretty much constantly whenever I was around, but nope—day after day after day, I didn’t see him at all. His mate had never been in the habit of coming here on her own, and came with him just once or twice early in the season those other two years. Female Pileated Woodpeckers are the ones who select the nest tree—she must have chosen one on her own territory at least a few blocks from here, and BB must have decided to stick with her closer to there. Indeed, a woman named Kathryn sent me a message via Flickr a week and a half ago that she’d just seen a banded male Pileated Woodpecker at her feeder on Gladstone, five blocks down from Peabody Street. That was at least confirmation that he’s okay.
Young adult humans are just about as bad as Pileated Woodpeckers at texting to let you know they’re okay, but eventually we parents adjust, often, ironically, just as those young adults get vastly better at keeping in touch. I’ve yet to receive a text message from BB, so will have to depend upon the kindness of strangers in my neighborhood letting me know when they see him.
Meanwhile, with the snowstorm looming Sunday morning, what to my wondering eyes should appear at my feeder but BB! I guess as the barometric pressure fell, which birds can literally feel in their bones and air sacs, BB wanted to make sure his reliable old food supply is still available. That made me ridiculously happy. Even if he doesn’t come regularly anymore, I like knowing that he remembers that this is, indeed, a safe place to turn when the going gets tough.
I know I’m not supposed to count my Pileated Woodpeckers before they hatch, but maybe this coming summer, as he did last year, when it comes time to take his fledglings further and further from the nest, he’ll bring them here. That would be something to write home about.
