Weekend was twice in a lifetime

Editor’s note: This column is being reprinted from May 8, 2013. Jack was a bird lover. He’d frequently email bird pictures, often from his backyard, to me and a group of his friends. It was one of his weekend traditions.



What’s it mean when a “once in a lifetime experience” occurs twice in the same week?

We were renting a cabin for the week in Brown County, partly to get away from things but also to stretch the time between my journalism hall of fame induction and daughter Sally’s graduation from Indiana University Law School. (That’s two other “once in a lifetime experiences” occurring in an 8-day span.)

The weather — always an uncertainty this time of year in the Midwest — turned out to be nearly perfect for most of the week, with highs climbing into the upper 70s under crisp blue skies.

So we decided to make the most of it and hit the trails.

Our goal was to see if we were in any shape to take on what Connie and I have come to view as our 2014-25 challenge, hiking the lengthy Knobstone Trail in southern Indiana in a series of manageable bites.

The first test was Trail 8 in Brown County State Park. Armed with Phil Bloom’s excellent book, we had scoped out several options in the neighborhood before settling on Trail 8.

It’s a 3.5-mile loop and is classified by Bloom — a former outdoor writer for The Journal Gazette and now director of communications for the Indiana Department of Natural Resources — as “moderate to strenuous.”

The problem, of course, is who gets to decide what’s “moderate,” what’s “strenuous,” and what’s “rugged.”

Bloom’s guidebook probably ought to come with as many disclaimers as a prospectus for a mutual fund.

At any rate, it was a good hike. We took our time, watching birds and trying to identify wildflowers. And we ended up deciding that “moderate to strenuous” was a pretty fair rating.

The next day we drove over to McCormick’s Creek State Park, about 15 miles west of Bloomington, to try another trail with a similar rating.

And that’s when things truly got interesting.

We were about one-third of the way along on a 2-mile hike to and from Wolf Cave when we heard a bird call we’d never heard before.

Stopping in our tracks and staying silent, we were soon rewarded witha “once in a lifetime experience.”

A pileated woodpecker, the largest woodpecker in the United States, was about 25 feet away, flitting from one tree trunk to another.

Now I’ve heard of pileated woodpeckers for years, mostly from my late mother-in-law. Connie’s mom often recalled the one time in her life that she’d seen a pileated. They are that rare.

So we stood, mouths agape, and watched for as long as we could until the woodpecker moved on to another set of trees.

Roughly the size of a crow, the bird has a brilliant red crest and a white stripe from its face down onto its black body. It was making a sound sort of like a hen clucking, and when it hammered its beak into a tree it sounded like a jackhammer.

We kept saying, “Wow,” to one another as we completed the hike.

That was the “once in a lifetime” memory to hang onto.

Then, two days later, we were hiking again in Brown County. It was a 2-mile hike this time, and the terrain wasn’t as spectacular as our first hike of the week.

But about midway through, it happened: Another pileated woodpecker made an appearance.

This one, close enough that I could get a photo (a lousy, out-of-focus photo, but a photo just the same), was moving through some fallen trees, feasting on insects in their rotten trunks.

It was hard to believe: Two sightings of an amazing bird we never thought we’d ever encounter and both sightings within the same week.

My mother-in-law would have been thrilled.