Dave Bonta's poem begins like a page torn from a birdwatcher's notebook. Here is a tip for telling two similar woodpeckers apart: if it calls often, it's a hairy; if it calls less often, a downy. The tone is practical and a little dry, the kind of rule you could carry into a forest. Then the rule runs off its own edge: "never: an ivory-billed." The ivory-billed woodpecker is a bird whose survival is widely doubted, so the field guide has an entry for a creature you will never hear. What looked like an identification tip becomes a measure of absence.
The list is the poem's engine. Frequency slides down a scale, "often," "less often," "never," and the colons make each step feel like a row in a table. Look at what happens to the nouns, too. "Hairy woodpecker" is given in full, "a downy" has already lost its noun, and "an ivory-billed" is only an adjective hanging in the air, a description with no bird attached. The grammar thins out as the birds do. The ivory-billed also gets the most ornamental word in the poem, with its hyphen and its glint of "ivory," as if the language remembers a grandeur the woods can no longer supply.
The second stanza steps back from the birds and sounds almost like a proverb: "Each year the ground grows simpler / and the sky more complex." This is the poem's riskiest moment, because it never says what it means. Simpler ground suggests fewer species and fewer layers of life, though the poem leaves the cause unnamed. The sky's growing complexity is harder to pin down. It might be the traffic of aircraft, or stranger weather, or simply the way we look up when there is less to see at eye level. What is clear is the balance, ground set against sky and simple against complex. The sentence runs without a single comma, in an even, unhurried cadence. That calm, like a weather report, makes the loss feel settled rather than sudden.
Then the poem turns to a place: "Right over there, / in a hollow locust tree, / a hive of wild bees used to sleep." The pointing gesture implies a companion, someone being shown around, which fits the how-to promise of the title. The walk ends at a specific tree, and the details are tender. "Hollow" names a real feature of an old tree, but it also reads as an emptiness the poem has been building toward. "Sleep" is a gentle word for what a hive does, and the two small words "used to" change it into an elegy. Notice the verbs across the poem: "calls" and "grows" belong to the general present, but the last line slips into the past. The sequence of often, less often, never, used to is a quiet history of vanishing, compressed into nine lines.
Formally the poem is as plain as its subject. It is three tercets of free verse, with no rhyme and no fixed meter, only short lines of two or three stresses and mostly one- and two-syllable words. The sound work is subtle. "Often" echoes in the first two lines, and the h of "hairy" returns in "hollow" and "hive," a faint chime linking the living woodpecker to the emptied tree. The only full stop is at the very end, so the poem moves in one long breath and then simply stops, without a consoling turn.
That restraint is much of its significance. Words like extinction, pollution or climate never appear, and the poem doesn't scold. It teaches instead, borrowing the voice of a field guide, a form built to help us see what is present, and uses it to show what isn't. The title's verb works twice, since "to tell" means to distinguish and also to recount. Learning to tell the woodpeckers apart turns into telling the story of what has gone. The final image is a small, local one, a hive of wild bees in a locust tree, rather than a famous lost species. That choice suggests loss is not only something that happens to rare birds far away. It can be a particular spot you can point to, where something used to be.