“Just after the snow melts away but before the growing season starts, the northwoods is vulnerable to wildfire. As a volunteer firefighter, I was assigned to a crew to extinguish hotspots after a wildfire was contained in Hartford, Vermont,” McFarland explains. “As we doused old logs and snags one after the other, near dusk we came to this tree. We were mesmerized by the hot embers in the hollow trunk and flames running upward and licking out of the old pileated woodpecker feeding holes. Armed with only an iPhone in my pocket, I snapped a few quick photographs before we had to move on with our work.”