Life and death aerial dual in St. Marys skys.

I saw an interesting sight today. Around 1:00PM, I was basking in the sun on my driveway at my new house in Victoria Landing. Like many area S/Ds, it is built on former pulpwood land. All of the pine trees have been clear cut. I live on the outer perimeter of the S/D. I have a buffer of thickly planted, tall, skinny pine trees behind my house , but the view from the front towards the center of the S/D is just all clear sky. As I was sitting there watching the guys putting in my sprinkler system, I suddenly heard this loud and un-familiar squawking overhead. I look up to see in the clear sky a Cooper's hawk - which I immediately recognized by its distinctive silhouette, chasing after some sort of a black bird which I did not immediately recognize, until it took an evasive action and I could make out clearly that it was a Pileated Woodpecker. That's the largest one in north America (unless there really are still Ivory Bills living in Arkansas.) The Cooper's hawk feeds almost exclusively on other birds. As you can well imagine, he's pretty good at it. In the open air, I saw him close to within inches of snatching that pileated woodpecker out of the sky twice only to have the wood pecker do some amazing, high -G jinks at the last second that would have made an F-22 Raptor pilot green with envy. It was not looking good for the woodpecker, that is until the woodpecker made it into the thickly planted, scrawny pine trees. Man. once he got down amongst those trees, he was whipping in between those thing like a steel ball in a pin ball machine. The old hawk tried to keep up through the first couple of trees but then seemed to realize he was outclassed at tree dodging and gave it up. Last time I saw the woodpecker, he was still on afterburners and zig-zagging his brains out.