Longboat Key, Florida - At the northernmost tip of Longboat Key sits Greer Island (which is actually not an island but a peninsula). Here ravaged, overturned trees with huge root systems in the air, decorated with shells, await first time visitors who often look at them with mouths agape. White sands with long ropy vines bordered by water create a meditative atmosphere. That's where, one morning last year, I unexpectedly saw a pair of pileated woodpeckers. Over the next two and a half weeks I watched them excavate a large dead ash colored tree for what I believed would be a nest site. It was avian theater.

At 16 plus inches the pileated woodpecker is formidable in size. A bright red crest crowns its large head and neck, which have a series of sharply angled, alternating black and white streaks. The male has a red forehead while the female's is black. The male also has a short red "mustache" while the female's is black. Both have black bodies. At a distance they are eye-catching; up close they are striking.

The pileateds had just begun whacking holes high in a tree's trunk, presumably for a nest. The tree, which the pair selected as their condo site, towered against a carpet of pebbly clouds leaning toward the water where the Gulf of Mexico meets Sarasota Bay. I call it the "launching pad" because at various times I've seen ospreys, great blue herons and one immature bald eagle use it to take off over the channel, which is almost a half mile wide at this spot.

One is starting a hole from scratch. The bird's hammer-like head drives its long pointed bill into the wood. Fresh wood chips fly from the tree to the ground. Soon the bird's bill is buried up to its face into the tree trunk. The male shimmies around the tree's wide trunk, on long gray feet and black toes that look like curled metal. The two go round the tree in and out of sunshine and shade. Now the female is in the crook of a branch while the male is working up higher. Out on a limb now she helicopters up to the male, where the hole that he's been working on has advanced to the point where he can almost put his entire head in it. She comes round the trunk nudging him away and squeezes into the cavity. It looks as if this is going to be the portal to their condo.

Enough is enough for now and he flies off. His black wings lined with white on top and bottom seem to expand like magic, malleable elastic with every beat. Riveting. A minute later she goes to join him; a devoted and inseparable couple. They don't go too far but land in a smaller, leaning dead tree, whose base, at high tide, is in the water. She is pecking away by a branch and it isn't fresh wood chips that are flying but a strip of bark six-inches wide that falls in the water. Old wood is flying like snow flurries as she pulls another strip away from the tree and appears to be nibbling on insects. Welcome to the pantry.

Three days later the pair is still excavating the hole. Four days after that they are still at it. Maybe this tree is tougher than they thought. The male, perhaps a perfectionist is still whacking away. I wonder if they have moved in yet and if not when will they? Ten days later and over two and a half weeks after they started, I unexpectedly found the pair in the nearby smaller tree to which they'd earlier flown, when taking a break and which they culled for insects.

Now they were making a hole in it. Was this a new nest site? My first thought is that the pileateds had abandoned the launching pad because they didn't know until too late that it was a taking off platform for bigger birds and might not be suitable for raising nestlings. It never occurred to me that they didn't initially know this. I even ignored the obvious when I saw the male chased from the tree by a fish crow more than a week ago. I merely assumed they knew what kind of neighborhood they were moving into and that it wouldn't be a problem. I don't know if they jettisoned the launching pad and were excavating a nesting site here or elsewhere because that was the last time I saw the pair.

Several months later while reading about the pileateds' nesting habits I chanced on something that caught my attention. Each member of a pair of pileateds can have roosting sites in addition to the nesting site. Was the second tree a roosting site? Was the launching pad a nest site? Had I simply made a mistake? Probably but I'll never know.

Rather than losing sight of the proverbial forest for the trees, I realized it didn't actually make much difference if they had been nest building or roost building. Almost every day for over two weeks I had gotten to see a striking, uncommon pair of birds in a rugged, dramatic setting. To have seen these birds there for hours was to experience them and nature in a rare way. That kind of very good birding is something I won't soon forget.