Some years ago, I saw my first PWP while vacationing in the Smoky Mountains. I was absolutely thrilled and in awe at their size. A few years later, my wife and I cashed in our annual vacation dollars and tapped the bank to buy a weekend getaway cabin on the Tippecanoe River in Indiana. It turned out to be an incredible source for birding. Anyway, one Friday afternoon we arrive, unpack, and I walk down to the river from the short bluff the cabin was perched upon. As I walked past an older, dead Maple, I notice it's trunk base surrounded by hundreds of white wood chips, flat and about the size of your thumbnail. The entire tree was surrounded for about 20 ft from the trunk. Then another one came fluttering down. I looked up and could only see a retangular hole about 30 feet up. Then out popped Woody! A PWP stuck out his head, dropped the next chip, looked at me like "What?", then went back in to continue carving.
That summer, we enjoyed watching them raise their family. Our deck on the bluff was about 10 feet lower than that hole and about 75 feet away. What a coincidence; what a blessing.
The next year, they came back and did the same thing on another dead tree about 100 feet away.
As a footnote, we sold that place, headed back to the bank, and started working on our nature preserve project. We continue to get treated to the jungle yell of the PWP.