Forty-two years earlier, in the exact same spot, I had seen one. It was my first ever in the state. The species was a low-grade rarity in the region at the time, notable enough that I would have to “write it up” for the bird experts. And so I submitted my first ever “rare bird report,” carefully indicating the bird’s age and sex, dutifully reporting its behaviors and vocalizations, and adding that the bird was, in a word, “beautiful.”
Maybe the bird’s beauty was a reflection of its rarity. Or maybe, more likely, the bird was beautiful because of the weather. It had started snowing, that Sunday morning in February long ago, and the bird was luminous in the wintry landscape. Or maybe, and I would say this was the long and the short of it, the bird was, exactly as I said in my rare bird write-up, simply beautiful. That assessment was, in its way, as objective, as scientific, as the bird’s age and sex.
The bird was a red-bellied woodpecker, Melanerpes carolinus, a species that was on the verge of an explosive range expansion in the area. Not even five years later, it would be routine to see one in the park or anywhere else in the city. By the end of the decade, it was basically impossible to go birding and not see one.
And now here I was, forty-two years later—and, to be precise about it, forty-two years, one week, and three days later—at the same place. It was just a matter of time, no time at all, before one would show up for our little group of four birders at the feeders by the environmental center. Make sure you have the audio turned up for this short video of the bird:
Video by © Ted Floyd.
You can hear human voices in that video, although most of the words are hard to make out. But one word stands out loud and clear: the word “beautiful.” This particular individual is a male, told by the extensive scarlet on its head. A female visited the feeding operation, too. Female red-bellied woodpeckers are more complexly marked on the head, with the forecrown orangey, the crown gray, and the nape scarlet as on the male. Here’s a video:
Did you catch it? The very first word in the video. That same word: “beautiful,” equal parts heartfelt and objective. The bird is beautiful. Especially so on a day like that one. It had been raining hard, an insistent Pittsburgh sort of cold rain, if you’ll allow it, earlier that Sunday morning in February of this year; the precip had mostly let up while we were at the feeders, but it was still cold and gray, to the point of being quite bleak out there; and by the time we were heading back to the park exit, it was snowing.
Other than the word “beautiful,” it is difficult to discern what my companions are saying. But listen to the birds! Along with distant cardinal song and a bit of titmouse gargle, I can hear the rapid chatter of a Carolina chickadee, the clangor of a common grackle, and a chorus of red-winged blackbirds.
Wait. a. second.
Did I just say Carolina chickadee? And grackles and Red-wings?—come again? All of those would have been “good birds,” of the sort that you might be compelled to “write up” for the experts, back in the early 1980s. The Carolina chickadee, a few years ahead of the red-bellied woodpecker, was beginning its expansion into the city at the time; today it’s the dominant chickadee in Pittsburgh. Until fairly recently, common grackles and red-winged blackbirds were essentially never reported in the city’s parks in the dead of winter. And although northern cardinals and tufted titmouses were common feeder fare everywhere in the region at the time, that wouldn’t have been the case a century earlier, when both species were at the northern periphery of their range in places like Pittsburgh.
Times change.
But one thing hasn’t changed. Birds like the red-bellied woodpecker—whether they’re regionally rare or widespread and common; whether they’re male or female, young or adult; and whether it’s raining hard or snowing softly or just Pittsburgh bleak—are, in a single word, a word that signifies both the objective fact of the bird as well as our subjective response thereunto, beautiful. 
Female (left) and male (right) red-bellied woodpeckers at Pittsburgh’s Frick Park, Sun., Feb. 16, 2025. Photos by © Ted Floyd.
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