Downy & the Goldenrod

Trail Wood #53 Earl Plato
Spring comes to us this Friday. It has already about to come to Edwin Teale’s Trail Wood. He wrote: “ On this morning in the wake the quiet storm, Nellie and I wade on a wandering course through woods, along the brook, and across the fields. We take our time. The sun shines. The day grows warm. The calling of a titmouse and redwing charges the air with the emotion of spring. Twice on the way we stop beside the stems of last years goldenrods. Each stem exhibits a round, balloon like swelling and each time the swelling has been punctured by the chisel of a downy woodpecker. On a cold winter day in winter the bird had excavated the round, bevelled hole and had extracted the pupa within the sphere of the goldenrod gall. This handiwork of the little woodpecker trvives in my memory an experience that I relate as we cross the final field toward home. In a French restaurant just off Times Square in New York an elderly lady at an adjoining table had talked earnestly to a companion about woodpeckers and then about other phases of natural history. She read daily from the Encyclopaedia Britannica. She said, “ You know if anyone does as I have done and reads the encyclopaedia a little each day, it is possible to learn many interesting things.”