Sunbonnet Soliloquy

By Jewell Ellen Smith

Woodpecker’s Toes

“Quick, (husband) Smitty, run upstairs and get me the binoculars! I’ve got my hands in this pie dough.”

“Huh? What?” Smitty roused himself up from his Lazy-Boy chair and turned the blaring TV down. “What’d you say, Hon?”

“Go get the binoculars. I’d go, but I’m up to my elbows in this pie crust.” I sifted a bit more flour on the rolling pin and at the same time glanced out the kitchen window again. The woodpecker I’d been watching was still there.

“Sure, Hon.” Smitty yawned and started toward the stairs. “I didn’t know you had to look through binoculars to mix up pie dough.”

“Silly! Just bring me the binoculars. They’re up yonder on your desk.”

By this time Smitty was halfway up the steps. “What kind ‘a pie is it gonna be?”

“Apple. Do hurry, or my woodpecker will be gone and I’ll never know if he’s the common yoke-toed or the rare three-toed variety.”

As I tried to lift the pie crust into the pan it tore in two places, but I managed to patch it up fairly well.

I could hear Smitty coming back down the stairs, mumbling something about what difference it makes in this wide world how many toes a woodpecker has.

“Here are your binoculars, Lady Birdwatcher.”

“Focus ‘em for me, Hon, while I rinse off this sticky dough.” I hurried over to the sink. “He’s right there on the Hickory -- about four yards up from the ground. See him?”

“Yeah, I see him. He’s a handsome devil.” Smitty leaned one elbow against the window ledge and re-adjusted the binoculars. “Wow, he’s really working over that bark. Look at that! Why, his beak’s just like a chisel -- exactly like a chisel.”

“His feet, Smitty! Look at his feet, not his beak!”

I dried my hands and waited.

“My word, he’s using his tail to balance himself! No wonder he can prance up and down the tree so fast.”

“Look at his feet! Count his toes!”

“I can’t. He’s hopped around on the other side of the tree. Ah, good! Here he comes back again. My, his head feathers sure are red -- a bright red.”

“Gim’me those binoculars so I can count his toes!

I grabbed the binoculars. The bird flew away.

“Gee, I’m sorry, Hon. I should‘a looked at his feet, first.”

“That’s all right.”

Smitty went on back into the den. I put the top crust on the apple pie and eased it into the oven.

In a few minutes Smitty was back, my new bird book in hand.

“It says here in this book that except for the genus Picoides -- whatever that means -- all North American woodpeckers have four toes, two of which point forward and two backward.”

“Well, that settles that. He was just an ordinary red-headed woodpecker, with four toes on each foot.”

Smitty sat down on the kitchen stool and kept reading.

“Just listen to the stuff these crazy woodpeckers eat: poison ivy seeds, wood-boring weevils, leaf-eating beetles, ants, bark lice, soldier bugs, caterpillars, crickets, eggs of cock roaches, grasshoppers, and spiders.’”

That episode took place some weeks ago. I still keep the binoculars on the kitchen window ledge, but the handsome Red Cockaded woodpecker hasn’t been back. Not yet. He will come, though.

On another winter day, very early in the morning, we watched some other common birds, at close range.

To be exact, it was the morning Fort Rucker was observing the National Prayer Breakfast. Just at daylight, Smitty and I were driving along Burdette Road en route to the breakfast program when we almost ran over four big buzzards clustered in the middle of the highway.

They were enjoying their own breakfast, a hapless ‘possum who had not made it across the road the night before.

“Just the cleanup crew,” Smitty remarked.

“Yes,” I agreed. And I looked at the feet of the four scavengers as they flapped their huge wings and flew out of the way.

Their feet were big and clumsily formed, not adapted to seizing and killing, or holding, prey. They couldn’t even pick up the ‘possum remains and take it off to a safe place.

We drove on to the Officers’ Club for the prayer breakfast, which was indeed a fine patriotic-religious program.

On the way home -- and since -- I’ve thought of how all birds and all other creatures, including human beings, must have duties to perform, reasons for existence -- else the world would not need each of us.

Perhaps we should take a pair of binoculars, stand in front of a mirror, and look closely to see how the Creator made our feet.

Published March 1983. Click your browser’s “Back” button to return.