perfidy

A friend of my wife's, an older woman who has figured out where she belongs and intends to stay there forever, has picked herself a really nice place to stay. She lives alone in a 200 year old house on the fringes of a salt marsh just up the coast from us in the old shipbuilding town of Essex, Massachusetts. One of the great attractions of living on the marsh is the abundance of wildlife she finds passing through her lawn on any given day. Newts, bullfrogs, turtles, rabbits, deer and the occasional coyote all make their appearances. But the strangest thing happens around Labor Day. Right around that time, the berries on the trees around her house (don't ask me what the trees are) ripen on the branch and begin to ferment.

Soon, the woodpeckers come. Pileated woodpeckers, to be exact. Lots of them; dozens. Rather more than are typically seen together in northern coastal Massachusetts.

Every year around Labor Day, when the berries get so ripe on the trees that they begin to ferment, dozens of pileated woodpeckers come to her house to have themselves a party. They perch on the trees, eat the berries, and get drunk on the juice. Dozens of woodpeckers come to her house and get drunk on the juice of berries, and then they hang upside down from the branches of the trees and call to each other all through the night.

True story.