Perched above the noise of town, I didn't find this one in the forest. I found it from a rooftop.
It was in La Crucecita, the town at the heart of Huatulco on the Oaxaca coast. There was concrete beneath my feet and green just beyond the edge of the building, where a tangle of branches grew up beside the structure. The bird was a golden-cheeked woodpecker, and it arrived almost silently.
A wild visitor in an urban frame
What I remember is how unhurried it was. It threaded itself into the branches beside the building and settled, a wild visitor framed by a very human place. It was one of those moments that asks you not to move too fast. You just watch, and let the scene settle in.
I've written before about how some of my favourite encounters in Huatulco happened when I wasn't expecting much, including the encounter that became Twin Motmots. This one went a step further. I wasn't in a park or on a trail at all. I was on a roof.
Meet the golden-cheeked woodpecker
The golden-cheeked woodpecker (Melanerpes chrysogenys) lives only in Mexico. It is endemic to the tropical lowlands of the country's west, so seeing one is a small privilege that belongs to this part of the world.
It is also more at home around people than you might expect. Field guides describe it in woodlands and coconut plantations, but also in gardens and semi-open areas with taller trees, including towns and villages. In other words, a rooftop in La Crucecita is not such a strange place to meet one after all. It just doesn't feel like the place you go looking for wildlife.
Its signature is a bold black patch around the eye, which sets it apart from similar woodpeckers with barred, "ladder" backs. Males carry a flame-red patch on the crown, while females have a pale greyish crown. This bird shows no red on the crown, which suggests it is a female.
Those same field guides describe the species as often noisy and conspicuous. That makes the quiet way this one arrived feel even more like luck.
What the photograph is really about
When I look at this piece, there are three places my eye can go first: the warm gold at the back of the head, the red eye inside its black mask, or the texture of the bark it is clinging to.
That is the composition working. The bird sits to the right of the frame, its back a dense pattern of black-and-white barring, almost graphic, set against a soft, pale background. Around it, the branches and stems become a loose structure of verticals, some sharp and some blurred into the foreground. A single pink bloom hangs at the top of the frame, the only other warm colour in the image, and it echoes the gold of the head without competing with it.
Look closely at the branch the woodpecker holds and you will see its surface is cracked and patterned, almost like the bird's own markings. I didn't plan that rhyme between bird and bark. I just noticed it once I was looking at the image on screen.
The background holds no rooftops, walls or wires. The urban part of the story lives outside the frame. Inside it, everything is branch, leaf, flower and feather. For me that is the quiet trick of the photograph: an encounter that happened in town, presented as a scene that could be anywhere wild.
A small crossing of worlds
This is the kind of encounter I love turning into a fine-art print: a small, quiet crossing of worlds that you might walk past in real time, but can live with a little longer on the wall.
The woodpecker's visit lasted only as long as it chose to stay. The print gives that moment back the time it didn't have, so you can notice the barring, the eye and the bark long after the bird has moved on.
That, more than anything, is what I hope people take from this story. Wildlife isn't only in reserves and national parks. Sometimes it is just past the edge of a building, waiting for someone to stop long enough to see it. Stay curious about the places you'd normally walk past.
Bringing Golden Cheek home
Golden Cheek is a square composition, which makes it an easy piece to place, whether alone above a console, in a stairwell or within a gallery wall. As an acrylic glass print it becomes a statement piece, with the black-and-white barring crisp and the background luminous. It is also available on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308 fine-art paper for collectors, and as a gallery-wrapped canvas or framed canvas for a softer, matte finish. More work from this coast is in the Mexican Fine Art Series, and the story of Laguna Ventanilla, further west near Mazunte, is in the Journal.
