Ancient Vikings and eye seat belts.

Looking for the sasquatch, we took a trail through a dark forest of old Douglas firs, tall monsters with their tops blocking the sunlight; away from the edge of the forest, the rest of the trunks were bare, with deeply grooved, broken, and lumpy bark.  Any branches remaining below the greenery above were dead, black, wildly convoluted.

Bark, bits of burls, woodpecker holes (two sizes).

This tree has fallen, but got hung up on two others high above us by its tangle of dead branches.

Stump. With a face. An ancient Viking, maybe?

It's woodpecker habitat. At the edge of the forest, we came across a busy pileated woodpecker, pounding away at fallen wood.

He* sees me hiding behind a tree, but continues with his search for grubs.

*He's a male: the males have the red crest, and a red "mustache", as well.

Pileated woodpeckers need a large territory of old growth forest; one pair occupies about a square kilometer. Rebecca  Spit, where we met this one, is about 2 kilometres long, but only about an average of 150 metres across; it's his back yard only.

He pounded away at the broken logs on the ground; before he left, he'd made visible square holes in it:

His fresh holes are a paler brown.

Why don't woodpeckers get headaches?

Woodpeckers hit their heads up to 20 times a second. But muscles, bones and an extra eyelid protect their small bird brains.
Strong, dense muscles in the bird's neck give it strength to repeatedly thump its head. But it is extra muscles in the skull that keep the bird from getting hurt. These muscles act like a protective helmet for the brain.
Unlike the human brain, the woodpecker's brain is tightly confined by muscles in the skull and a compressible bone. This keeps the woodpecker brain from jiggling around when the bird is stabbing away at a tree trunk.
A millisecond before making impact, a woodpecker contracts its neck muscles. Then, it closes its thick inner eyelid.
 The eyelid acts like a seat belt for the eye, said University of California Davis ophthalmologist Ivan Schwab, whose 2007 study on this phenomenon was published in the British Journal of Ophthalmology.
Without an extra eyelid, the retina could tear, and worse, the eye could pop out of its socket. (From LiveScience.com)

I almost got a headache, watching him.

Sasquatch site and woodpecker forest.