Cross Creek

by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

An exotic visitor came several years in June to my grove, and I was mad with excitement. I believed it to be an ivory-billed woodpecker, considered probably extinct, or very nearly so. The woodpecker was enormous. Swooping from trunk to trunk of the orange trees, he appeared the size of a half-grown turkey. He was brilliant in black and red and white, and gave a loud clapper-like cry. I discovered that he was almost certain to be, not the ivory-billed, but the large pileated woodpecker. There is one distinguishing mark between the two, and for two Junes I have had my Audubon bird book ready to open to the two portraits, to identify definitely my visitor, but he has never come again. At the Creek the pileated woodpecker is known as the Lord-God.