Photo from the Great Smoky Mountains Web Site
I love pileated woodpeckers. We have them here in the North West, in fact in a woodland a couple of miles from our house. But the point to this story is that I had them on the place where I lived in Missouri, which was 10 acres of walnuts, hickories, oaks and red buds on a lake eleven miles from Jefferson City.
One day at the office I was mentioning to one of the guys who worked for me how much I was enjoying seeing quite a few pileated woodpeckers. Since he was quite a naturalist - in fact that was probably why I even mentioned it to him in the first place - I was surprised when he asked me what a pileated woodpecker was. When I had finished describing the bird -"a big woodpecker about the size of a heron with a huge long sharp beak and a red Woody Woodpecker topknot" - he told me I must be hallucinating because there wasn't any such thing in Missouri.
As luck would have it, he and I stopped at my place to get something one afternoon on our way to an appointment in Columbia. As we were leaving the place, which involved going down the quarter mile of gravel hill I called my driveway, off the side a pileated woodpecker burst out of the trees and landed on a tree trunk in plain sight. "My companion said "what the hell is that?" "That's one of those things that there aren't any of in Missouri" I responded.
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