I remember exactly where I was the first time I saw a woodpecker. It wasn’t dramatic. No grand forest or nature reserve. I was sitting on a low wall, mug of tea in hand, just letting the morning settle around me. The garden was quiet. A bit of light mist. One of those early spring days where everything feels like it’s waking up.
I heard the sound before I saw the bird that rapid drumming from somewhere beyond the trees. At first, I thought it was a gardener hammering something or a builder with a strange rhythm. But it was too organic. Too fast. And it echoed through the branches in a way that didn’t quite belong to us.
I followed the sound with my eyes and there, clinging to the trunk of the old birch tree at the back of the garden, was a flash of black, white, and the most brilliant patch of red.
I froze. Not because I was afraid of scaring it off, I didn’t even have a camera back then but because I couldn’t believe I was actually seeing one. A real, living woodpecker. It was smaller than I’d imagined, but every movement was packed with precision. It tapped, paused, looked around.
Its claws gripped the bark so tightly, its tail feathers spread out like a little tripod to keep it steady. The red on the back of its head glowed like embers in the morning sun. It was there for less than a minute, but something shifted in me. Until that moment, I’d never really considered birds beyond the usual garden visitors. But this this was different. This was wild.
What amazed me most was how silent everything else became. The woodpecker wasn’t loud. The drumming had stopped. But the presence of that one bird seemed to hush the whole garden. I stood still, watched it for as long as I could, and then as quickly as it had arrived it vanished behind the tree and was gone. No fanfare. No fluttering exit. Just gone.
I felt oddly emotional. Not in a grand life-changing way, but in the way a good song or a kind word can stop you in your tracks. It was a moment. A gentle interruption that stayed with me long after the bird had disappeared.
That encounter didn’t spark an immediate obsession. But it did plant a seed. I started looking out more. Listening more. Wondering if it would come back. I added a few feeders, just in case. I started reading up on the types of woodpeckers found in the UK.
I didn’t even know what species it was at the time I had to look it up. Great Spotted Woodpecker, male, based on that red nape. Once I knew the name, it became personal. I started thinking of him as a visitor, not just a bird. And from that point on, I noticed them more. In the park. On walks. In snippets of sound on the breeze.
Looking back, that first sighting was more than a birdwatching moment. It was a perspective shift. A reminder that wildness exists right next to us, not just in documentaries or far-off landscapes, but in gardens and back lanes and the quiet corners of suburbia.
That moment with the woodpecker didn’t just open my eyes to birds. It made me realise how much of life is happening unnoticed. And once you notice it, you can’t stop. You start listening for echoes. Watching branches. Leaving the camera rolling, just in case. Because once you’ve seen a woodpecker really seen one you know there’s a whole world out there, just waiting to be noticed.
