“WAKE-up! WAKE-up! WAKE-up!”
So speaks the acorn woodpecker, chiding his comrades for their laziness. “WAKE-up! WAKE-up!” He repeats this two-syllabled phrase in constant dialogue with his brothers and sisters, who typically respond in kind, vehemently rejecting any implication of sleepiness on their part. No acorn woodpecker hesitates when faced with the Stoic accusation:
Is this the purpose of my creation, to lie here under the blankets and keep myself warm?
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations V.1
Well, of course that’s part of the human purpose – what creature do you think invented blankets, mighty imperator? But these woodpeckers are blanketless models of diligent purposefulness. There are always more acorns to gather, store, and protect. Acorn woodpeckers are the most industrious of birds, filled with a strong instinct towards saving for the future, but without either the foresight to know when enough is enough or the human ability to rationalize short-term excuses. When it comes to acorn harvesting, they are unqualified workaholics who would make the good emperor proud:
Give your heart to the trade you have learnt, and draw refreshment from it. Let the rest of your days be spent as one who has wholeheartedly committed his all to the gods.
Meditations IV.31
“WAKE-up! WAKE-up!” the woodpeckers demand. When I step into the woods, I hear their loud admonition and no longer feel asleep.
The laughing clown of California
Those voices are often the first attention-grabber when one walks into a grove of acorn woodpeckers. I was reading an old bird book recently, as I often do, titled Birds of the West, written by Ernest Sheldon Booth in 1950. Professor Booth is generally very restrained in his commentary; in fact, he gives no commentary at all on any woodpecker species except this one. What fact compelled him to break his scholarly reticence? What observation could he not refrain from making? “This is a very noisy woodpecker.”
The birds talk to each other constantly, with their main style of dialogue being based on repetitions of that two-syllabled WAKE–up phrase and its variants. A purely abstract transliteration might be kreek-kut or you could think of it as Jacob, Jacob if you want a dash of memorability but fear excessive interpretative liberty. The call has also been described as laugh-like, somewhere on a spectrum from “raucous” to “maniacal.” When a whole tree’s worth of woodpeckers erupts in vociferous indignation, it may indeed sound like a madhouse. These are no gentle chuckles.
Imagine if there were a dozen of these voices instead of two.
The appearance of the acorn woodpecker may also influence that impression of laughter, with a distinct “clown face” defined by large white eyes, cheeks, and forehead superimposed over a background of black. Both males and females have red on their heads, on males a larger patch that extends all the way to the white forehead. For practical identification, notice that their back is entirely black, distinguishing acorn woodpeckers from our other small woodpeckers, who have white either between their wings in a vertical patch (downy and hairy woodpeckers) or in a series of horizontal bars (the “ladder-backed” Nuttall’s woodpecker).
Overall, they are easy to recognize. We have several woodpeckers in Novato – overviewed here – but the acorn woodpecker is often the first one people learn to distinguish as an individual. The downy, hairy, and Nuttall’s are all generally similar in appearance and habits; flickers are atypical to the point of flying under a beginning bird student’s woodpecker radar; and pileated woodpeckers are too scarcely seen to be a common entree into the kingdom of ‘peckers. But the acorn woodpecker is both highly distinctive and easily and dependably found.
In fact, when pondering the question “Were I emperor of Novato, what bird would I declare the official bird of the city?” (obviously a high priority task were I to suddenly accede to that position), this is the bird I keep coming back to. Acorn woodpeckers are fitting representatives of our landscape, but never seem to grow boring and mundane. Their quirkiness is inexhaustible.
And it’s not just Novato – the acorn woodpecker is representative of California itself. Look at a range map of the bird: California is clearly the species’ stronghold, although it is also present in the southwestern states and the oak-laden mountains of Mexico and Central America. For a long time, they were actually known to the world as the “California Woodpecker,” which would be fairly fitting. Unlike the California Gull, which is a prime example of the silliness of nomenclatural inertia.
In Spanish-speaking lands, they sometimes call the bird the carpintero arlequín, which is pretty nice: many woodpeckers are carpinteros, but none are as diligent in their woodcraft as this one, and arlequín is a likewise suitable recognition of their clown costumes. “Harlequin carpenter” is a professional title of well-merited extravagance. Overall though, I can’t really complain about “acorn woodpecker,” which sets its sights directly on the most essential relationship of this bird to its environment: these birds need oaks and their acorns.
Abundant starches are the foundation of civilization
Beyond their general vociferous wackiness, what undoubtedly garners people’s attention is this habit of acorn hoarding. Have you ever seen an acorn woodpecker granary?
That is the work of this bird and no other. Back in the 20s, a man like my old friend Dawson could declare that the force behind such collections would be “perfectly well known to every Californian.” Do you consider yourself a Californian? Then you should be able to answer that first test of citizenship: who stores the acorns? The acorn woodpecker, obviously.
This is not common among American birds. Many will privately store food for later – I’ve written about jays’ individual planting of acorns, and various members of the titmouse, chickadee, and nuthatch families will also save food. But to assemble a larder on this scale, as a collective tribal endeavor, and then to guard it from interloping jays, squirrels, and other would-be acorn thieves is unique. When an American student takes a class in ecology and learns about the different social arrangements of our native fauna, the acorn woodpecker is the textbook example of such a cooperative system.
The evolutionary directive behind this way of life was presumably tied to various facts inherent to the nature of acorns as a food source: they keep well (as long as kept away from the ground and its moisture), they are produced in sudden large amounts that cannot all be immediately consumed, they are abundant and massive enough to provide a primary food source, and their habitat is also one of congenial nesting and food storage sites. The natural abundance of acorns provides a set of circumstances akin to the development of human agriculture: it makes permanent group settlement possible. And the consequences of acorn collectivism extend beyond a mutually-defended pantry and carry over to every aspect of life, more successfully than human communism ever quite managed.
One of the hardest nuts for the political theorists to crack was cooperative breeding – it was always difficult to convince humans that only some should have kids, which would then be raised communally with the aid of the less worthy. Acorn woodpecker colonies mitigate the impersonality by their small size: they typically consist of a few males and a few females that breed indiscriminately among themselves, and then several helpers, often including the previous years’ offspring, who assist in feeding the new young. But the basic fact of collectivism is still there, as strange among birds as it is among people: the average young ‘pecker does not know who his parents are.
Theoretically, human experiments in cooperative living were based on a spirit of égalité and fraternité. In large-scale practice, they typically devolved into dependence on strict rules, stern dogma, and ruthless enforcement.
“The last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer but better Russians.”
The tribalism of the acorn woodpecker runs in better accord with their fundamental nature. Do they have their squabbles, bursts of vociferous posturing and vigorous games of tag? Sure. But the small group size creates a general atmosphere of shared, familial endeavor; short lifespans, rapid reproduction, and intertribal migration allow plentiful opportunities for promotion to the breeding ranks; and the nutty abundance of the great oaks of California ensures that one’s labors will be rewarded. Scarcity and want helped to curtail the visions of Marx, Lenin, and Mao. But when a massive flood of acorns weighs down the boughs with nature’s bounty, a group effort is what converts a temporary windfall into a state of continual plenitude.
Acorn woodpeckers are the textbook example of avian collectivism. But their social habits are not part of an arcane, hidden knowledge revealed only in colleges. They are obvious to anyone who stops before a granary of acorns and sees the labor of generations, to anyone who halts beneath a bird-filled oak and hears the many-voiced clamor, the same in the quiet of winter as amid the songs of spring.
The ridiculous sense of destiny
The harlequin carpenters work in the oaks, busy at their hoarding, day after day. This constant occupation in the familiar security of their little kingdom makes them less apt to be disturbed than the cautious exploring loners that are the other woodpeckers:
The Woodpecker is our native aristocrat. He is unruffled by the operations of the human plebs in whatever disguise… Wigwams, haciendas, or university halls, what matter such frivolities, if only one may go calmly on with the main business of life, which is indubitably the hoarding of acorns.
[It is] his life work to enshrine all the acorns, one by one, in appropriate wooden niches, so long as life shall last. This is his bounden duty, his meat and drink, his religion, and his destiny.
Dawson, The Birds of California, 1923
It is the busy hoarders that have sufficient tunnel vision to have a sense of religion and destiny. Sounds like people! Casual, easygoing types who take life one day at a time tend not to get so fixated on an unchanging purpose. Of course, Dawson is speaking of the “religion and destiny” of the acorn woodpecker in a humorous sense, making fun of both the generally ridiculous aspect of this clown-faced bird and general overseriousness of purpose. With humans, it is often easy to take those hard workers at their word, to accept their seriousness as the fitting attitude of dignified, diligent, business-like beings. But with acorn woodpeckers, the clownishness inevitably overflows into the foreground of our attention.
Like human hoarding, the labors of the woodpeckers can often exceed all bounds of practical use and likely redemption of value. It is an irrational instinct: you will often hear stories of acorn woodpeckers deciding that the siding of a house seems to have the correctly spongy, dead-wood consistency to make a good granary site. They begin to insert acorns: wack, wack, WACK and with the final thump the nut goes straight through the 3/4” board and falls down between the studs, out of sight and irrecoverable. What to do? Nothing but continue: add acorn after acorn, as his duty is.
With a real tree, the acorns are typically retrievable, but you can likewise see a massive buildup of tens of thousands of acorns, seemingly beyond practical need, given their utilization of other food sources (insects, fruits, other seeds). But the hammering must go on. I once saw an acorn woodpecker attempting to hammer a mouse corpse into an acorn-sized hole, unsuccessfully. “The niches must be filled.”
The behavior of acorn woodpeckers has its ridiculous aspect, as the behavior of humans can have. But whether you see it as comically ridiculous, tragically Sisyphean, or simply as the manifestation of an evolutionarily successful instinct is more reflective of the observer’s temperament and mood than an absolute and objective judgment. Some people, inclined to pride and a sense of human superiority, always view acorn woodpeckers as ridiculous clowns. More scientific types see nothing funny or futile in their behavior, but simply note that the species exists and the system has worked. In the same way, different people may find certain human impulses material for laughter, tragedy, or simply mechanistic evolutionary theorizing, according to their own philosophical inclination.
I like to rotate. And the acorn woodpecker is my favorite subject for practicing adroit switching between interpretive moods.
Are you taking yourself too seriously, weighed down by illusions regarding the cosmic importance of the petty scheming of normal human existence? Listen to their ridiculous laughter and look at their faces of permanent wide-eyed astonishment. Gain some perspective: we are just as comical.
Feel like all output of effort is pointlessly absurd and that it’s time to set the hammer, pen, computer aside? Concede that the woodpeckers survive and that their pantry is full; concede that any labor to which one feels impelled must have a long-term purpose, one way or another. It puts food on the table and provides the self-fulfilling satisfaction of doing one’s work.
Acorn woodpeckers unforgettably display what is rarely consciously combined: absurdity and seriousness in constant simultaneity. I have a great sympathy for the ridiculous:
Distribute the dignified people and the capable people and the highly business-like people among all the situations which their ambition or their innate corruption may demand; but keep close to your heart, keep deep in your inner councils the absurd people. Let the clever people pretend to govern you, let the unimpeachable people pretend to advise you; let the laughable people whose faults you see and understand be the only people who are really inside your life, who really come near you or accompany you on your lonely march towards the last impossibility.
G.K. Chesterton on David Copperfield
And yet I opened this essay with Stoic admonitions: I respect those who do their work. The harlequin carpenter embodies both mentalities. They practice the diligent, professional seriousness that shows up day after day without questioning the cosmic importance of their labor. And yet their appearance, voice, and lack of perspective in fulfilling their acorn-hoarding duty renders it impossible to forget the absurd perspective, the perspective not of scornful ridicule, but of joyful, ebullient comedy.
Acorn woodpeckers and humans participate alike in this curious sense of destiny and purpose. The woodpeckers help me to laugh about it. But they also help me to stick to it.
Photo by Christine Hansen.
Header photo by Allan Hack
Love your writing and tidbits of useful information. It all helps when trying to remember the volumes of details in regards to our feathered friends.
Your article was so amusing and truly captured the essence of the acorn woodpecker. We have been calling them the clown bird as well.
Thank you Jack for your poetic insight.
Another excellent essay! Great “I do not understand this” photo & love the quote by GK Chesterton. Thanks again, Jack!