No fatal attraction

Our studio was added onto our house sometime in the sixties, and like the rest of the house, has plenty of windows.  The north facing windows are high above the ground and overlook our little ravine and stream.  The south window received that standard of mid-century modern, a picture window.  Flanked by two additional windows.

(Grass like shredded wheat this summer.)

All the years we were weavers there weren’t any bird vs. window incidents of note.  Perhaps because there were sunflowers and other goodies in the garden below the window birds stopped short of the big window.

But last summer, as Jan was quilting, she heard a major THUMP behind her, at the window.  She went out to look, and found a woodpecker on the ground.  Alive, but completely comatose.  She couldn’t leave him.  Purrl would have put some puncture wounds in the fellow, just to carry him to the door and let us know he’d moved up from dropping live chipmunks at our feet.

She was standing in the front yard, holding the poor fellow, when I came home and went straight for the camera.

She stood and held him for perhaps half an hour.  Woodie opened his eyes once, then settled snugly in to recover by hand.

There was nothing to be done that we knew of, bird concussions not in our repertoire. He needed to go somewhere to recover.

How to put him in a tree was a problem.  Woodpeckers cling to the sides of trees and don’t perch, as far as we know.

Jan put him first in the tulip tree.  It’s still a bush and dense, like a nest.  He seemed quite comfy, but it was not beyond Purrl height, so she took him out back to the cottonwood tree and put him in a comfy crook.  She went back to check in a quarter hour and he was gone.