Natural Thoughts: Boring

The other day I was hiking around a forest preserve on a trail in a ravine.  It was a large forest preserve only 15 miles from downtown Chicago, which could be seen in a haze off to the east.  The cool lake breeze was blocked by the large hills in the preserve, which made for a gentle and warm spring day with many wildflowers in bloom (figure 1).  As I walked along the ravine, I spotted a Pileated Woodpecker (Hylatomas pileatus) scrounging around on the forest floor plucking insects and other invertebrates from a rotting log.
Figure 1:  The intermittent stream valley (ravine) where I sat and watched a Pileated Woodpecker
I decided to rest by sitting on a log and watching the woodpecker eat.  I watched as it sucked up every last insect from one rotting log before moving onto the next.  Sometimes it would cling itself to a dead tree snag to see what it could find, but old oak snags are somewhat rot resistant and probably did not offer much in terms of food for the woodpecker, who would quickly move on to another rotting snag or log.  At one point it arched its back and lifted its tail feathers to take a dump.

I stayed and watched this woodpecker for nearly 20 minutes.  To most people, this probably sounds like it was a boring activity.  Don't you think so?  And it was.   It was incredibly boring!  For God's sake, this was my day off!  Didn't I have something better to do than to watch a big bird eat a bunch of grubs and then take a shit?  I had a long drive home and rush-hour traffic was picking up.  I had laundry to do and phone calls to make, and I needed to decide when I was going to get my next oil change for my car or what I should pack for lunch for the next day.  Decisions needed to be made, and time was running out,   And my work week was going to be very busy!

I wonder what the woodpecker would think if he had a human equivalent of intelligence.  He would look at us and wonder why the hell we were worrying about the little things we worry about when all he ever worried about was eating grubs and beetles from a rotting log on a forest floor, on a warm spring day with sunshine filtering through the trees, concerned only with eating enough food to keep himself alive and fertile.    Maybe it would be better to spend some more time doing nothing but watching the Pileated Woodpecker going about his day.  It's boring to do that, and we need more of this kind of boring stuff in our lives.

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