So Many Interesting Things

I rode my bike for an hour before lunch, over to the Ahwahnee Meadow where they’re doing a lot of restoration work, planting native grasses and removing invasives. Many trees are being felled between the meadow and the lodge, again, non-natives such as sequoias that are crowding out the native black oak. I talk to the guys doing some of the work, and to a ranger, and they say the same thing: there are too many trees in the valley, and not enough water to sustain them. Native people used to burn the valley annually, and there was a clear view from end to end. Now there is the beginning of a view—you can see parts of the Ahwahnee Hotel through the sparse woods. 

Everything is golden as I go up the far side of the meadow, past the climbers’ vans parked where we’ve often eaten breakfast. Suddenly three old Fords come putt-putting down the road, Model As or Ts, I don’t know my car alphabet, but the plates are from Oregon, 1926 and 1927. The are wonderful old cars, the real deal.

In the afternoon we head up river to have lunch, and then continue over to Mirror Lake, which is No-Mirror Lake right now, not a drop of water to reflect anything.  I hear the unmistakable sound of a woodpecker, and finally spot it in the canopy. There are two of them making a steady racket and throwing great chunks of bark every which way onto the trail. They have red heads, but are shaped very differently from any other woodpecker I’ve seen, and hefty as crows. It dawns on me that they look like Woody Woodpecker with their long thin faces and thin necks and fluffy crests. When I get back to camp I see that they are Pileated Woodpeckers, Dryocopus pileatus. If you can enlarge the extra, it’s possible to see what I think is the bird’s tongue flicking into the hole in the bark, or maybe it’s a worm he’s sucking out. I know as much about woodpeckers as I do about old Fords, so it could be anything.