Walking around in a slight drizzle at dusk, the eyes see a very large woodpecker, one that he had read about* but had never before seen on his orinthological hikes, hopping from tree trunk to tree trunk, in the search for something, perhaps dinner or perhaps a hole to spend the rainy night.

After an afternoon and evening spent re-reading short novels by The Great Russians (Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" and Dostoyevsky's "White Nights"), the sharp call and the shape of this bird had him trembling in anticipation; a strange sign that, perhaps, stands for something that he might discover and unravel in the year ahead.

* Most recently in a National Geographic's story "The Ghost Bird"