Rennie Sparks

Last September, in one of those early red-gold days of autumn, I was awakened by a tap-tap-tapping out in the backyard. A woodpecker was hammering at the old Box Elder out past the prickly pears near the back alley. I lay in bed awhile letting my thoughts circle:

How does a woodpecker know which trees are full of bugs? What do those bugs know when a woodpecker’s beak hammers close? What does the tree know when a woodpecker hammers into its bark?

Whenever I find myself trying to empathize with a tree or with insect larvae or with a bird, I know there’s a good chance an idea for a song is brewing. Of course this doesn’t mean a song will get finished, but it does mean I’m going to spend a few hours sitting on the couch Googling words like “woodpecker” and “box elder beetle” and that I will then spend even more time staring off into space and scribbling in a notebook.

I have a lot of notebooks full of scribbles. They often don’t lead to anything, but sometimes, on lucky days, the scribbles begin to connect into a mystery that I can not look away from until it is laid bare. What was once a jumble of words and ideas begins to feel magnetized and full of import. Oh, those are lucky days!

Mostly I just sit on the couch and follow the sparks here and there until they disperse.

That morning that began with a tap-tap-tapping led to an afternoon in which I learned a lot about woodpeckers. I found out that woodpeckers have very long tongues with barbs on the end. I found out that woodpeckers have specially designed skulls that protect them from impact, like a built-in crash helmet. I also found out that woodpecker hearing is amazingly acute. These birds can actually hear larvae slithering inside a tree trunk as they are flying past overhead.

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Rennie Sparks is the lyricist and banjo player for the folk duo The Handsome Family, and the author of “Wilderness,” a collection of essays and art to accompany the group’s latest album, also titled “Wilderness.”