cover

[i]

[ii]

THE WOODPECKERS

BY

FANNIE HARDY ECKSTORM

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

[iii]

COPYRIGHT, 1900, BY FANNIE HARDY ECKSTORM

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

[iv]

To

MY FATHER

MR. MANLY HARDY

A Lifelong Naturalist

[vi]

CONTENTS

[viii]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

The colored illustrations are by Louis Agassiz Fuertes. The text
cuts are from drawings by John L. Ridgway.

[1]

THE WOODPECKERS

FOREWORD: THE RIDDLERS

Long ago in Greece, the legend runs, a terrible
monster called the Sphinx used to waylay
travelers to ask them riddles: whoever could not
answer these she killed, but the man who did
answer them killed her and made an end of her
riddling.

To-day there is no Sphinx to fear, yet the
world is full of unguessed riddles. No thoughtful
man can go far afield but some bird or
flower or stone bars his way with a question
demanding an answer; and though many men
have been diligently spelling out the answers
for many years, and we for the most part must
study the answers they have proved, and must
reply in their words, yet those shrewd old riddlers,
the birds and flowers and bees, are always
ready for a new victim, putting their heads together
over some new enigma to bar the road
to knowledge till that, too, shall be answered;[2]
so that other men’s learning does not always
suffice. So much of a man’s pleasure in life, so
much of his power, depends on his ability to
silence these persistent questioners, that this little
book was written with the hope of making
clearer the kind of questions Dame Nature asks,
and the way to get correct answers.

This is purposely a little book, dealing only
with a single group of birds, treating particularly
only some of the commoner species of that
group, taking up only a few of the problems
that present themselves to the naturalist for solution,
and aiming rather to make the reader
acquainted with the birds than learned about
them.

The woodpeckers were selected in preference
to any other family because they are patient
under observation, easily identified, resident in
all parts of the country both in summer and in
winter, and because more than any other birds
they leave behind them records of their work
which may be studied after the birds have
flown. The book provides ample means for identifying
every species and subspecies of woodpecker
known in North America, though only
five of the commonest and most interesting
species have been selected for special study.
At least three of these five should be found in[3]
almost every part of the country. The Californian
woodpecker is never seen in the East, nor
the red-headed in the far West, but the downy
and the hairy are resident nearly everywhere,
and some species of the flickers and sapsuckers,
if not always the ones chosen for special notice,
are visitors in most localities.

Look for the woodpeckers in orchards and
along the edges of thickets, among tangles of
wild grapes and in patches of low, wild berries,
upon which they often feed, among dead trees
and in the track of forest fires. Wherever there
are boring larvæ, beetles, ants, grasshoppers, the
fruit of poison-ivy, dogwood, june-berry, wild
cherry or wild grapes, woodpeckers may be confidently
looked for if there are any in the neighborhood.
Be patient, persistent, wide-awake, sure
that you see what you think you see, careful to
remember what you have seen, studious to compare
your observations, and keen to hear the
questions propounded you. If you do this seven
years and a day, you will earn the name of Naturalist;
and if you travel the road of the naturalist
with curious patience, you may some day become
as famous a riddle-reader as was that OEdipus, the
king of Thebes, who slew the Sphinx.[4]

I

HOW TO KNOW A WOODPECKER

The woodpecker is the easiest of all birds to
recognize. Even if entirely new to you, you may
readily decide whether a bird is a woodpecker or
not.

The woodpecker is always striking and is
often gay in color. He is usually noisy, and his
note is clear and characteristic. His shape and
habits are peculiar, so that whenever you see a
bird clinging to the side of a tree “as if he had
been thrown at it and stuck,” you may safely
call him a woodpecker. Not that all birds which
cling to the bark of trees are woodpeckers,—for
the chickadees, the crested titmice, the nuthatches,
the brown creepers, and a few others
like the kinglets and some wrens and wood-warblers
more or less habitually climb up and down
the tree-trunks; but these do it with a pretty
grace wholly unlike the woodpecker’s awkward,
cling-fast way of holding on. As the largest of
these is smaller than the smallest woodpecker,
and as none of them (excepting only the tiny[5]
kinglets) ever shows the patch of yellow or scarlet
which always marks the head of the male
woodpecker, and which sometimes adorns his
mate, there is no danger of making mistakes.

The nuthatches are the only birds likely to
be confused with woodpeckers, and these have
the peculiar habit of traveling down a tree-trunk
with their heads pointing to the ground. A
woodpecker never does this; he may move down
the trunk of the tree he is working on, but he
will do it by hopping backward. A still surer
sign of the woodpecker is the way he sits upon
his tail, using it to brace him. No other birds
except the chimney swift and the little brown
creeper ever do this. A sure mark, also, is his
feet, which have two toes turned forward and
two turned backward. We find this arrangement
in no other North American birds except
the cuckoos and our one native parroquet. However,
there is one small group of woodpeckers
which have but three toes, and these are the only
North American land-birds that do not have four
well-developed toes.

In coloration the woodpeckers show a strong
family likeness. Except in some young birds,
the color is always brilliant and often is gaudy.
Usually it shows much clear black and white,
with dashes of scarlet or yellow about the head.[6]
Sometimes the colors are “solid,” as in the red-headed
woodpecker; sometimes they lie in close
bars, as in the red-bellied species; sometimes in
spots and stripes, as in the downy and hairy;
but there is always a contrast, never any blending
of hues. The red or yellow is laid on in
well-defined patches—square, oblong, or crescentic—upon
the crown, the nape, the jaws, or
the throat; or else in stripes or streaks down
the sides of the head and neck, as in the logcock,
or pileated woodpecker.

There is no rule about the color markings of
the sexes, as in some families of birds. Usually
the female lacks all the bright markings of the
male; sometimes, as in the logcock, she has them
but in more restricted areas; sometimes, as in
the flickers, she has all but one of the male’s
color patches; and in a few species, as the red-headed
and Lewis’s woodpeckers, the two sexes
are precisely alike in color. In the black-breasted
woodpecker, sometimes called Williamson’s
sapsucker, the male and female are so
totally different that they were long described
and named as different birds. It sometimes
happens that a young female will show the color
marks of the male, but will retain them only the
first year.

Though the woodpeckers cling to the trunks[7]
of trees, they are not exclusively climbing birds.
Some kinds, like the flickers, are quite as frequently
found on the ground, wading in the
grass like meadowlarks. Often we may frighten
them from the tangled vines of the frost grape
and the branches of wild cherry trees, or from
clumps of poison-ivy, whither they come to eat
the fruit. The red-headed woodpecker is fond
of sitting on fence posts and telegraph poles;
and both he and the flicker frequently alight on
the roofs of barns and houses and go pecking
and pattering over the shingles. The sapsuckers
and several other kinds will perch on dead limbs,
like a flycatcher, on the watch for insects; the
flickers, and more rarely other kinds, will sit
crosswise of a limb instead of crouching lengthwise
of it, as is the custom with woodpeckers.

All these points you will soon learn. You
will become familiar with the form, the flight,
and the calls of the different woodpeckers; you
will learn not only to know them by name, but
to understand their characters; they will become
your acquaintances, and later on your friends.

This heavy bird, with straight, chisel bill and
sharp-pointed tail-feathers; with his short legs
and wide, flapping wings, his unmusical but not
disagreeable voice, and his heavy, undulating,
business-like flight, is distinctly bourgeois, the[8]
type of a bird devoted to business and enjoying
it. No other bird has so much work to do all
the year round, and none performs his task with
more energy and sense. The woodpecker makes
no aristocratic pretensions, puts on none of the
coy graces and affectations of the professional
singer; even his gay clothes fit him less jauntily
than they would another bird. He is artisan to
the backbone,—a plain, hard-working, useful
citizen, spending his life in hammering holes in
anything that appears to need a hole in it. Yet
he is neither morose nor unsocial. There is a
vein of humor in him, a large reserve of mirth
and jollity. We see little of it except in the
spring, and then for a time all the laughter in
him bubbles up; he becomes uproarious in his
glee, and the melody which he cannot vent in
song he works out in the channels of his trade,
filling the woodland with loud and harmonious
rappings. Above all other birds he is the friend
of man, and deserves to have the freedom of the
fields.[9]

II

HOW THE WOODPECKER CATCHES A GRUB

Did you ever see a hairy woodpecker strolling
about a tree for what he could pick up?

There is a whur-r-rp of gay black and white
wings and the flash of a scarlet topknot as, with
a sharp cry, he dashes past you, strikes the
limb solidly with both feet, and instantly sidles
behind it, from which safe retreat he keeps a
sharp black eye fixed upon your motions. If
you make friends with him by keeping quiet, he
will presently forgive you for being there and
hop to your side of the limb, pursuing his ordinary
work in the usual way, turning his head
from side to side, inspecting every crevice, and
picking up whatever looks appetizing. Any
knot or little seam in the bark is twice scanned;
in such places moths and beetles lay their eggs.
Little cocoons are always dainty morsels, and
large cocoons contain a feast. The butterfly-hunter
who is hoping to hatch out some fine
cecropia moths knows well that a large proportion
of all the cocoons he discovers will be empty.[10]
The hairy woodpecker has been there before him,
and has torn the chrysalis out of its silken cradle.
For this the farmer should thank him
heartily, even if the butterfly-hunter does not,
for the cecropia caterpillar is destructive.

But sometimes, on the fair bark of a smooth
limb, the woodpecker stops, listens, taps, and begins
to drill. He works with haste and energy,
laying open a deep hole. For what? An apple-tree
borer was there cutting out the life of
the tree. The farmer
could see no sign of
him; neither could
the woodpecker, but
he could hear the strong grub down in his little
chamber gnawing to make it longer, or, frightened
by the heavy footsteps on his roof, scrambling
out of the way.

Boring larva.

It is easy to hear the borer at work in the
tree. When a pine forest has been burned and
the trees are dead but still standing, there will
be such a crunching and grinding of borers eating
the dead wood that it can be heard on all
sides many yards away. Even a single borer
can sometimes be heard distinctly by putting the
ear to the tree. Sound travels much farther
through solids than it does through air; notice
how much farther you can hear a railroad train[11]
by the click of the rails than by the noise that
comes on the air. Even our dull ears can detect
the woodworm, but we cannot locate him.
How, then, is the woodpecker to do what we
cannot do?

Doubtless experience teaches him much, but
one observer suggests that the woodpecker places
the grub by the sense of touch. He says he
has seen the red-headed woodpecker drop his
wings till they trailed along the branch, as if
to determine where the vibrations in the wood
were strongest, and thus to decide where the
grub was boring. But no one else appears to
have noticed that woodpeckers are in the habit
of trailing their wings as they drill for grubs.
It would be a capital study for one to attempt
to discover whether the woodpecker locates his
grub by feeling, or whether he does it by hearing
alone. Only one should be sure he is looking
for grubs and not for beetles’ eggs, nor for
ants, nor for caterpillars. By the energy with
which he drills, and the size of the hole left
after he has found his tidbit, one can decide
whether he was working for a borer.

But when the borer has been located, he has
yet to be captured. There are many kinds of
borers. Some channel a groove just beneath the
bark and are easily taken; but others tunnel[12]
deep into the wood. I measured such a hole
the other day, and found it was more than eight
inches long and larger than a lead-pencil, bored
through solid rock-maple wood. The woodpecker
must sink a hole at right angles to this
channel and draw the big grub out through his
small, rough-sided hole. You would be surprised,
if you tried to do the same with a pair
of nippers the size of the woodpecker’s bill, to
find how strong the borer is, how he can buckle
and twist, how he braces himself against the
walls of his house. Were your strength no
greater than the woodpecker’s, the task would
be much harder. Indeed, a large grub would
stand a good chance of getting away but for
one thing, the woodpecker spears him, and
thereby saves many a dinner for himself.

Indian spear.

Here is a primitive Indian fish-spear, such as
the Penobscots used. To the end of a long
pole two wooden jaws are tied loosely enough to
spring apart a little under pressure, and midway
between them, firmly driven into the end of the[13]
pole, is a point of iron. When a fish
was struck, the jaws sprung apart under
the force of the blow, guiding the iron
through the body of the fish, which was
held securely in the hollow above, that
just fitted around his sides, and by the
point itself.

Solomon Islander's spear.

The tool with which the woodpecker
fishes for a grub is very much the same.
His mandibles correspond to the two movable
jaws. They are knife-edged, and the
lower fits exactly inside the upper, so that
they give a very firm grip. In addition,
the upper one is movable. All birds can
move the upper mandible, because it is
hinged to the skull. (Watch a parrot
some day, if you do not believe it.) A
medium-sized woodpecker, like the Lewis’s,
can elevate his upper mandible at least a
quarter of an inch without opening his
mouth at all. This enables him to draw
his prey through a smaller hole than
would be needed if he must open his
jaws along their whole length. Between
the mandibles is the sharp-pointed
tongue, which can be thrust entirely through a
grub, holding him impaled. Unlike the Indian’s
spear-point, the woodpecker’s tongue is[14]
barbed heavily on both sides, and it is extensile.
As a tool it resembles the Solomon Islander’s
spear. A medium-sized woodpecker can dart his
tongue out two inches or more beyond the tip of
his bill. A New Bedford boy might tell us, and
very correctly, that the woodpecker harpoons
his grub, just as a whaleman harpoons a whale.
If the grub tries to back off into his burrow,
out darts the long, barbed tongue and spears
him. Then it drags him along the crooked
tunnel and into the narrow shaft picked by the
woodpecker, where the strong jaws seize and
hold him firmly.[15]

III

HOW THE WOODPECKER COURTS HIS MATE

Other birds woo their mates with songs, but
the woodpecker has no voice for singing. He cannot
pour out his soul in melody and tell his love
his devotion in music. How do songless birds
express their emotions? Some by grotesque actions
and oglings, as the horned owl, and some
by frantic dances, as the sharp-tailed grouse,
woo and win their mates; but the amorous
woodpecker, not excepting the flickers, which
also woo by gestures, whacks a piece of seasoned
timber, and rattles off interminable messages
according to the signal code set down for
woodpeckers’ love affairs. He is the only instrumental
performer among the birds; for the
ruffed grouse, though he drums, has no drum.

There is no cheerier spring sound, in our belated
Northern season, than the quick, melodious
rappings of the sapsucker from some dead ash
limb high above the meadow. It is the best
performance of its kind: he knows the capabilities
of his instrument, and gets out of it all the[16]
music there is in it. Most if not all woodpeckers
drum occasionally, but drumming is the special
accomplishment of the sapsucker. He is
easily first. In Maine, where they are abundant,
they make the woods in springtime resound
with their continual rapping. Early in
April, before the trees are green with leaf, or
the pussy-willows have lost their silky plumpness,
when the early round-leafed yellow violet
is cuddling among the brown, dead leaves, I
hear the yellow-bellied sapsucker along the
borders of the trout stream that winds down
between the mountains. The dead branch of
an elm-tree is his favorite perch, and there, elevated
high above all the lower growth, he sits
rolling forth a flood of sound like the tremolo
of a great organ. Now he plays staccato,—detached,
clear notes; and now, accelerating his
time, he dashes through a few bars of impetuous
hammerings. The woods reëcho with it;
the mountains give it faintly back. Beneath
him the ruffed grouse paces back and forth on
his favorite mossy log before he raises the palpitating
whirr of his drumming. A chickadee
digging in a rotten limb pauses to spit out
a mouthful of punky wood and the brown
Vanessa, edged with yellow, first butterfly of
the season, flutters by on rustling wings. So[17]
spring arrives in Maine, ushered in by the reveille
of the sapsucker.

So ambitious is the sapsucker of the excellence
of his performance that no instrument but
the best will satisfy him. He is always experimenting,
and will change his anvil for another
as soon as he discovers one of superior resonance.
They say he tries the tin pails of the maple-sugar
makers to see if these will not give him a
clearer note; that he drums on tin roofs and
waterspouts till he loosens the solder and they
come tumbling down. But usually he finds nothing
so near his liking as a hard-wood branch,
dead and barkless, the drier, the harder, the
thinner, the finer grained, so much the better
for his uses.

Deficient as they are in voice, the woodpeckers
do not lack a musical ear. Mr. Burroughs
tells us that a downy woodpecker of his acquaintance
used to change his key by tapping on a
knot an inch or two from his usual drumming
place, thereby obtaining a higher note. Alternating
between the two places, he gave to his
music the charm of greater variety. The woodpeckers
very quickly discover the superior conductivity
of metals. In parts of the country
where woodpeckers are more abundant than
good drumming trees, a tin roof proves an[18]
almost irresistible attraction. A lightning-rod
will sometimes draw them farther than it would
an electric bolt; and a telegraph pole, with its
tinkling glasses and ringing wires, gives them
great satisfaction. If men did not put their
singing poles in such public places, their music
would be much more popular with the woodpeckers;
but even now the birds often venture
on the dangerous pastime and hammer you out a
concord of sweet sounds from the mellow wood-notes,
the clear peal of the glass, and the ringing
overtones of the wires.

The flicker often telegraphs his love by tapping
either on a forest tree or on some loose
board of a barn or outhouse; but he has other
ways of courting his lady. On fine spring mornings,
late in April, I have seen them on a horizontal
bough, the lady sitting quietly while her
lover tried to win her approval by strange antics.
Quite often there are two males displaying their
charms in open rivalry, but once I saw them
when the field was clear. If fine clothes made
a gentleman, this brave wooer would have been
first in all the land: for his golden wings and
tail showed their glittering under side as he
spread them; his scarlet headdress glowed like
fire; his rump was radiantly white, not to speak
of the jetty black of his other ornaments and[19]
the beautiful ground-colors of his body. He
danced before his lady, showing her all these
beauties, and perhaps boasting a little of his own
good looks, though she was no less beautiful.
He spread his wings and tail for her inspection;
he bowed, to show his red crescent; he
bridled, he stepped forward and back and sidewise
with deep bows to his mistress, coaxing her
with the mellowest and most enticing co-wee-tucks,
which no doubt in his language meant
“Oh, promise me,” laughing now and then his
jovial wick-a-wick-a-wick-a-wick-a, either in glee
or nervousness. It was all so very silly—and
so very nice! I wonder how it all came out.
Did she promise him? Or did she find a gayer
suitor?[20]

IV

HOW THE WOODPECKER MAKES A HOUSE

All woodpeckers make their houses in the
wood of trees, either the trunk or one of the
branches. Almost the only exceptions to this
rule are those that live in the treeless countries
of the West. In the torrid deserts of Arizona
and the Southwest, some species are obliged to
build in the thorny branches of giant cacti,
which there grow to an enormous size. In the
treeless plains to the northward, a few individuals,
for lack of anything so suitable as the
cactus, dig holes in clay banks, or even lay their
eggs upon the surface of the prairie. In a country
where chimney swallows nest in deserted
houses, and sand martins burrow in the sides of
wells, who wonders at the flicker’s thinking that
the side of a haystack, the hollow of a wheel-hub,
or the cavity under an old ploughshare,
is an ideal home? But in wooded countries
the woodpeckers habitually nest in trees. The
only exceptions I know are a few flickers’ holes
in old posts, and a few instances where flickers[21]
have pecked through the weatherboarding of a
house to nest in the space between the walls.

But because a bird nests in a hole in a tree,
it is not necessarily a woodpecker. The sparrow-hawk,
the house sparrow, the tree swallow, the
bluebird, most species of wrens, and several of
the smaller species of owls nest either in natural
cavities in trees or in deserted woodpeckers’ holes.
The chickadees, the crested titmice, and the nuthatches
dig their own holes after the same pattern
as the woodpecker’s. However, the large,
round holes were all made by woodpeckers, and
of those under two inches in diameter, our friend
Downy made his full share. It is easy to tell
who made the hole, for the different birds have
different styles of housekeeping. The chickadees
and nuthatches always build a soft little
nest of grass, leaves, and feathers, while the
woodpeckers lay their eggs on a bed of chips,
and carry nothing in from outside.

Soon after they have mated in the spring, the
woodpeckers begin to talk of housekeeping.
First, a tree must be chosen. It may be sound or
partly decayed, one of a clump or solitary; but
it is usually dead or hollow-hearted, and at least
partly surrounded by other trees. Sometimes a
limb is chosen, sometimes an upright trunk, and
the nest may be from two feet to one hundred[22]
feet from the ground, though most frequently it
will be found not less than ten nor more than
thirty feet up. However odd the location finally
occupied, it is likely that it was not the first one
selected. A woodpecker will dig half a dozen
houses rather than occupy an undesirable tenement.
It is very common to find their unfinished
holes and the wider-mouthed, shallower
pockets which they dig for winter quarters; for
those that spend their winters in the cold North
make a hole to live in nights and cold and
stormy days.

The first step in building is to strike out a
circle in the bark as large as the doorway is to
be; that is, from an inch and a half to three
or four inches in diameter according to the size
of the woodpecker. It is nearly always a perfect
circle. Try, if you please, to draw freehand a
circle of dots as accurate as that which the woodpecker
strikes out hurriedly with his bill, and see
whether it is easy to do as well as he does.

If the size and shape of the doorway suit him,
the woodpecker scales off the bark inside his
circle of holes and begins his hard work. He
seems to take off his coat and work in his shirtsleeves,
so vigorously does he labor as he clings
with his stout toes, braced in position by his
pointed tail. The chips fly out past him, or if[23]
they lie in the hole, he sweeps them out with his
bill and pelts again at the same place. The
pair take turns at the work. Who knows how
long they work before resting? Do they take
turns of equal length? Does one work more
than the other? A pair of flickers will dig
about two inches in a day, the hole being nearly
two and a half inches in diameter. A week or
more is consumed in digging the nest, which,
among the flickers, is commonly from ten to
eighteen inches deep. The hole usually runs in
horizontally for a few inches and then curves
down, ending in a chamber large enough to
make a comfortable nest for the mother and her
babies.

What a good time the little ones have in their
hole! Rain and frost cannot chill them; no
enemy but the red squirrel is likely to disturb
them. There they lie in their warm, dark chamber,
looking up at the ray of light that comes in
the doorway, until at last they hear the scratching
of their mother’s feet as she alights on the
outside of the tree and clambers up to feed them.
What a piping and calling they raise inside the
hole, and how they all scramble up the walls of
their chamber and thrust out their beaks to be
fed, till the old tree looks as if it were blossoming
with little woodpeckers’ hungry mouths![24]

V

HOW A FLICKER FEEDS HER YOUNG[1]

As the house of the woodpecker has no windows
and the old bird very nearly fills the doorway
when she comes home, it is hard to find out
just how she feeds her little ones. But one of
our best naturalists has had the opportunity to
observe it, and has told what he saw.

A flicker had built a nest in the trunk of a
rather small dead tree which, after the eggs were
hatched, was accidentally broken off just at
the entrance hole. This left the whole cavity
exposed to the weather; but it was too late to
desert the nest, and impossible to remove the
young birds to another nest.

When first visited, the five little birds were
blind, naked, and helpless. They were motherless,
too. Some one must have killed their pretty
mother; for she never came to feed them, and
the father was taking all the care of his little
family. When disturbed the little birds hissed
like snakes, as is the habit of the callow young[25]
of woodpeckers, chickadees, and other birds nesting
habitually in holes in trees. When they were
older and their eyes were open, they made a clatter
much like the noise of a mowing-machine,
and loud enough to be heard thirty yards away.

The father came at intervals of from twenty
to sixty minutes to feed the little ones. He
was very shy, and came so quietly that he would
be first seen when he alighted close by with a
low little laugh or a subdued but anxious call
to the young. “Here I am again!” he laughed;
or “Are you all right, children?” he called to
them. “All right!” they would answer, clattering
in concert like a two-horse mower.

As soon as they heard him scratching on the
tree-trunk, up they would all clamber to the edge
of the nest and hold out their gaping mouths to
be fed. Each one was anxious to be fed first,
because there never was enough to go round.
There was always one that, like the little pig of
the nursery tale, “got none.” When he came
to the nest, the father would look around a
moment, trying to choose the one he wanted to
feed first. Did he always pick out the poor little
one that had none the time before, I wonder?

After the old bird had made his choice, he
would bend over the little bird and drive his
long bill down the youngster’s throat as if to[26]
run it through him. Then the little bird would
catch hold as tightly as he could and hang on
while his father jerked him up and down for a
second or a second and a half with great rapidity.
What was he doing? He was pumping
food from his own stomach into the little one’s.
Many birds feed their young in this way. They
do not hold the food in their own mouths, but
swallow and perhaps partially digest it, so that it
shall be fit for the tender little stomachs.

While the woodpecker was pumping in this
manner his motions were much the same as when
he drummed, but his tail twitched as rapidly as
his head and his wings quivered. The motion
seemed to shake his whole body.

In two weeks from the time when the little
birds were blind, naked, helpless nestlings they
became fully feathered and full grown, able to
climb up to the top of the nest, from which
they looked out with curiosity and interest.
At any noise they would slip silently back. A
day or two later they left the old nest and began
their journeys.

No naturalist has been able to tell us whether
other woodpeckers than the golden-winged flicker
feed their young in this way; and little is known
of the number of kinds of birds that use this
method, but it is suspected that it is far more[27]
common than has ever been determined. If an
old bird is seen to put her bill down a young one’s
throat and keep it there even so short a time as
a second, it is probable that she is feeding the
little one by regurgitation, that is, by pumping
up food from her own stomach. Any bird seen
doing this should be carefully watched. It has
long been known that the domestic pigeon does
this, and the same has been observed a number
of times of the ruby-throated hummingbird. A
California lady has taken some remarkable photographs
of the Anna’s hummingbird in the act,
showing just how it is done.[28]

VI

FRIEND DOWNY

No better little bird comes to our orchards
than our friend the downy woodpecker. He is
the smallest and one of the most sociable of our
woodpeckers,—a little, spotted, black-and-white
fellow, precisely like his larger cousin the hairy,
except in having the outer tail-feathers barred
instead of plain. Nearly everything that can be
said of one is equally true of the other on a
smaller scale. They look alike, they act alike,
and their nests and eggs are alike in everything
but size.

Downy is the most industrious of birds. He
is seldom idle and never in mischief. As he
does not fear men, but likes to live in orchards
and in the neighborhood of fields, he is a good
friend to us. On the farm he installs himself
as Inspector of Apple-trees. It is an old and an
honorable profession among birds. The pay is
small, consisting only of what can be picked up,
but, as cultivated trees are so infested with insects
that food is always plentiful, and as they have
[29]usually a dead branch suitable to nest in, Downy
asks no more. Summer and winter he works on
our orchards. At sunrise he begins, and he
patrols the branches till sunset. He taps on the
trunks to see whether he can hear any rascally
borers inside. He inspects every tree carefully
in a thorough and systematic way, beginning low
down and following up with a peek into every
crevice and a tap upon every spot that looks suspicious.
If he sees anything which ought not to
be there, he removes it at once.

A moth had laid her eggs in a crack in the
bark, expecting to hatch out a fine brood of
caterpillars: but Downy ate them all, thus saving
a whole branch from being overrun with caterpillars
and left fruitless, leafless, and dying. A
beetle had just deposited her eggs here. Downy
saw her, and took not only the eggs but the beetle
herself. Those eggs would have hatched into
boring larvæ, which would have girdled and killed
some of the branches, or have burrowed under
the bark, causing it to fall off, or have bored
into the wood and, perhaps, have killed the tree.
Nor is the full-grown borer exempt. Downy
hears him, pecks a few strokes, and harpoons
him with unerring aim. When Downy has
made an arrest in this way, the prisoner does
not escape from the police. Here is a colony[30]
of ants, running up the tree in one line and
down in another, touching each other with their
feelers as they pass. A feast for our friend!
He takes both columns, and leaves none to tell
the tale. This is a good deed, too, since ants
are of no benefit to fruit-trees and are very fond
of the dead-ripe fruit.

And Downy is never too busy to listen for
borers. They are fine plump morsels much to
his taste, not so sour as ants, nor so hard-shelled
as beetles, nor so insipid as insects’ eggs. A
good borer is his preferred dainty. The work he
does in catching borers is of incalculable benefit,
for no other bird can take his place. The warblers,
the vireos, and some other birds in summer,
the chickadees and nuthatches all the year
round, are helping to eat up the eggs and
insects that lie near the surface, but the only
birds equipped for digging deep under the bark
and dragging forth the refractory grubs are the
woodpeckers.

So Downy works at his self-appointed task in
our orchards summer and winter, as regular as a
policeman on his beat. But he is much more
than a policeman, for he acts as judge, jury,
jailer, and jail. All the evidence he asks against
any insect is to find him loafing about the premises.
“I swallow him first and find out afterwards[31]
whether he was guilty,” says Downy with
a wink and a nod.

Most birds do not stay all the year, in the
North, at least, and most, in return for their
labors in the spring, demand some portion of
the fruit or grain of midsummer and autumn.
Not so Downy. His services are entirely gratuitous;
he works twice as long as most others.
He spends the year with us, no winter ever
too severe for him, no summer too hot; and
he never taxes the orchard, nor takes tribute
from the berry patch. Only a quarter of his
food is vegetable, the rest being made up of
injurious insects; and the vegetable portion
consists entirely of wild fruits and weed-seeds,
nothing that man eats or uses. Downy feeds
on the wild dogwood berries, a few pokeberries,
the fruit of the woodbine, and the seeds of the
poison-ivy,—whatever scanty and rather inferior
fare is to be had at Nature’s fall and winter
table. If in the cold winter weather we will take
pains to hang out a bone with some meat on it,
raw or cooked, or a piece of suet, taking care
that it is not salted,—for few wild birds except
the crossbills can eat salted food,—we may see
how he appreciates our thoughtfulness. Shall we
grudge him a bone from our own abundance, or
neglect to fasten it firmly out of reach of the cat[32]
and dog? If his cousin the hairy and his neighbor
the chickadee come and eat with him, bid
them a hearty welcome. The feast is spread for
all the birds that help men, and friend Downy
shall be their host.[33]

VII

PERSONA NON GRATA

We shall not attempt to deny that Downy
has an unprincipled relative. While it is no discredit,
it is a great misfortune to Downy, who is
often murdered merely because he looks a little,
a very little, like this disreputable cousin of his.
The real offender is the sapsucker, that musical
genius of whom we have already spoken.

The popular belief is that every woodpecker is
a sapsucker, and that every hole he digs in a
tree is an injury to the tree. We have seen that
every hole Downy digs is a benefit, and now we
wish to learn why it is that the sapsucker’s work
is any more injurious than other woodpeckers’
holes; how we are to recognize the sapsucker’s
work; and how much damage he does. We will
do what the scientists often do,—examine the
bird’s work and make it tell us the story. There
is no danger of hurting the sapsucker’s reputation.
The farmer could have no worse opinion
of him; and, though the case has been appealed
to the higher courts of science more than once,[34]
where the sapsucker’s cause has been eloquently
and ably defended, the verdict has gone against
him. Scientists now do not deny that the sapsucker
does harm. But his worst injury is less
in the damage he does to the trees than in the ill-will
and suspicion he creates against woodpeckers
which do no harm at all. If you will study the
picture and the descriptions in the Key to the
Woodpeckers, you will be able
to recognize the sapsucker and
his nearest relatives, whether in
the East or in the West. But
all sapsuckers may be known by
their pale yellowish under parts,
and by the work they leave behind.
As the yellow-bellied sapsucker
is the only one found east
of the Rocky Mountains, we shall
speak only of him and his work.

Work of Sapsucker.

Here is a specimen of the
yellow-bellied sapsucker’s work
which I picked up under the
tree from which it had fallen.
We do not need to inquire whether the tree
was injured by its falling, for we know that
the loss of sound and healthy bark is always a
damage. Was this sound bark? Yes, because
it is still firm and new. The sap in it dried
[35]quickly, showing that neither disease nor worms
caused it to fall; it is clean and hard on the
back, showing that it came from a live tree, not
from a dead, rotting log.

How do I know that a bird caused it to fall?
The marks are precisely such as are always left
by a woodpecker’s bill. How do I know that
it was a sapsucker’s work? Because no other
woodpecker has the habit which characterizes
the sapsucker, of sinking holes in straight lines.
The sapsuckers drill lines of holes sometimes
around and sometimes up and down the tree-trunk,
but almost always in rings or belts about
the trunk or branches. A girdle may be but a
single line of holes, or it may consist of four or
five, or more, lines. Sometimes a band will be
two feet wide; and as many as eight hundred
holes have been counted on the trunk of a single
tree. Such extensive peckings, however, are to
be expected only on large forest trees. Most
fruit and ornamental trees are girdled a few
times about the trunk, and about the principal
branches just below the nodes, or forks.

Why did the bird dig these holes? There are
three things that he might have obtained,—sap,
the inner bark, and boring larvæ. Some
naturalists have suggested a fourth as possible,—the
insects that would be attracted by the sap.[36]

We will see what the piece of bark tells us.
It is four and a half inches long, by an inch and
a half wide, and its area of six and three fourths
square inches has forty-four punctures. Does
this look as if the bird were digging grubs?
Do borers live in such straight little streets?
The number and arrangement of the holes show
that he was not seeking borers, while the naturalists
tell us that he never eats a borer unless
by accident. What did he get? Undoubtedly
he pecked away some of the inner bark. All
these holes are much larger on the back side of
the specimen than on the outer surface. While
the damp inner bark would shrink a little on
exposure to the air, we know that it could not
shrink as much as this; and investigation has
shown that the sapsucker feeds largely on just
such food, for it has been found in his stomach.
Two other possible food-substances remain,—sap
and insects. We know that the sapsucker
eats many insects, but it is impossible to prove
that he intended these holes for insect lures.
Sap he might have gotten from them, if he
wished it. We know that the white birch is full
of excellent sap, from which can be made a birch
candy, somewhat bitter, but nearly as good as
horehound candy. The rock and red maples
and the white canoe birch are the only trees in[37]
our Northern forests from which we make candy.
A strong probability that our bird wanted sap
is indicated by the arrangement of the holes.
Usually he drills his holes in rings around the
tree-trunk, but in this instance his longest lines
of holes are vertical. If our sapsucker was
drilling for sap, he arranged his holes so that it
would almost run into his mouth, lazy bird!

Our piece of bark has taught us:—

That the sapsucker injured this tree.

That he was not after grubs.

That he got, and undoubtedly ate, the soft
inner bark of the tree.

That he got, and may have drunk, the sap.

We could not infer any more from a single
instance, but the naturalists assure us that the
bird is in the habit of injuring trees, that he
never eats grubs intentionally, and that he eats
too much bark for it to be regarded as taken
accidentally with other food. About the sap
they cannot be so sure, as it digests very quickly.
There remain two points to prove: whether the
sapsucker drills his holes for the sake of the
sap, or for insects attracted by the sap, provided
that he eats anything but the inner bark.

Our little specimen can tell us no more, but
two mountain ash trees which were intimate
acquaintances of mine from childhood can go on[38]
with the story. Do not be surprised that I
speak of them as friends; the naturalist who
does not make friends of the creatures and
plants about will hear few stories from them.
These trees would not tell this tale to any one
but an intimate acquaintance. Let us hear what
they have to say about the sapsucker.

There are in the garden of my old home two
mountain ash trees, thirty-six years of age, each
having grown from a sprout that sprang up beside
an older tree cut down in 1863. They stand
not more than two rods apart; have the same
soil, the same amount of sun and rain, the same
exposure to wind, and equal care. During all
the years of my childhood one was a perfectly
healthy tree, full of fruit in its season, while the
other bore only scanty crops, and was always
troubled with cracked and scaling bark. To-day
the unhealthy tree is more vigorous than
ever before, while its formerly stalwart brother
stands a mere wreck of its former life and beauty.
What should be the cause of such a remarkable
change when all conditions of growth have remained
the same?

I admit that there is some internal difference
in the trees, for all the birds tell me of it. One
has always borne larger and more abundant fruit
than the other, but this is no reason why the[39]
birds should strip all the berries from that tree
before eating any from the other. When we
know that the favorite tree stands directly in
front of the windows of a much-used room and
overhangs a frequented garden path, the preference
becomes more marked. But robins, grosbeaks,
purple finches, and the whole berry-eating
tribe agree to choose one and neglect the other,
and even the spring migrants will leave the gay
red tassels of fruit still swinging on one tree, to
scratch over the leaves and eat the fallen berries
that lie beneath the other. My own taste is not
keen in choosing between bitter berries, but the
birds all agree that there is a decided difference
in these trees,—did agree, I should say, for their
favorite is the tree that is dying. Evidently
this is a question of taste. It is interesting to
observe that the sapsucker, which was never
seen to touch the fruit of the trees, agrees with
the fruit-eating birds. Nearly all his punctures
were in the tree now dying. Is there a difference
in the taste of the sap? Does the taste of
the sap affect the taste of the fruit? Or is it
merely a question of quantity? If he comes for
sap, he prefers one tree to the other on the score
either of better quality or greater quantity.

We will discuss later whether it is sap that he
wishes: all that now concerns us is to note[40]
that the internal difference, whatever it is, is in
favor of the tree that is dying; while the only
external difference appears to be the marks left
by the sapsucker. While one tree is sparingly
marked by him, the other is tattooed with his
punctures, placed in single rings and in belts
around trunk and branches beneath every fork.
It is a law of reasoning that, when every condition
but one is the same and the effects are different,
the one exceptional condition is the cause
of the difference. If these trees are alike in
everything except the work of the sapsucker (the
only internal difference apparently offsetting his
work in part), what inference do we draw as to
the effect of his work?

We presume that he is killing the tree, without
as yet knowing how he does it. What is
his object? Good observers have stated that
he draws a little sap in order to attract flies and
wasps; that the sap is not drawn for its own
sake, but as a bait for insects. Is this theory
true?

The first objection is that it is improbable.
The sapsucker is a retiring, woodland bird that
would hesitate to come into a town garden a
mile away from the nearest woods unless to get
something he could not find in the woods. Had
he wanted insects, he would have tapped a tree[41]
in the woods, or else he would have caught them
in his usual flycatching fashion. There must
have been something about the mountain ash tree
that he craved. As it is a very rare tree in the
vicinity of my home, the sapsucker’s only chance
to satisfy his longing was by coming to some
town garden like our own.

Not only is the theory improbable, but it fails
to explain the sapsucker’s actions in this instance.
In twenty years he was never seen to
catch an insect that was attracted by the sap he
drew. This does not deny that he may have
caught insects now and then, but it does deny
that he set the sap running for a lure. As he
was never far away, and was sometimes only
four and a half feet by measure from a chamber
window, all that he did could be seen. He
did not catch insects at his holes. He drank
sap and ate bark.

Finally, the theory is not only improbable and
inadequate, but in this instance it is impossible.
I do not remember seeing a sapsucker in the tree
in the spring; if he came in the summer, it must
have been at rare intervals; but he was always
there in the fall, when the leaves were dropping.
At that season the insect hordes had been dispersed
by the autumnal frosts, so that we know
he did not come for insects.[42]

In the many years during which I watched
the sapsuckers—for there were undoubtedly a
number of different birds that came, although
never more than one at a time—there was such
a curious similarity in their actions that it is
entirely proper to speak as if the same bird
returned year after year. His visits, as I have
said, were usually made at the same season. He
would come silently and early, with the evident
intention of making this an all-day excursion.
By eight o’clock he would be seen clinging to
a branch and curiously observant of the dining-room
window, which at that hour probably excited
both his interest and his alarm. Early in
the day he showed considerable activity, flitting
from limb to limb and sinking a few holes, three
or four in a row, usually above the previous
upper girdle of the limbs he selected to work
upon. After he had tapped several limbs he
would sit waiting patiently for the sap to flow,
lapping it up quickly when the drop was large
enough. At first he would be nervous, taking
alarm at noises and wheeling away on his broad
wings till his fright was over, when he would
steal quietly back to his sap-holes. When not
alarmed, his only movement was from one row
of holes to another, and he tended them with
considerable regularity. As the day wore on[43]
he became less excitable, and clung cloddishly to
his tree-trunk with ever increasing torpidity, until
finally he hung motionless as if intoxicated, tippling
in sap, a disheveled, smutty, silent bird,
stupefied with drink, with none of that brilliancy
of plumage and light-hearted gayety which made
him the noisiest and most conspicuous bird of our
April woods.

Our mountain ash trees have told us several
facts about the sapsucker:—

That he did not come to eat insects.

That he did come to drink sap, and that he
probably ate the inner bark also.

That he drank the sap because he liked it,
not for some secondary object, as insects.

That he could detect difference in the quality
or quantity of the sap, which caused him to
prefer a particular tree.

That this difference apparently was in the
taste of the sap, and that the effects of a day’s
drinking of mountain ash sap seemed to indicate
some intoxicant or narcotic quality in the
sap of that particular tree.

That the effect of his work upon the tree
was apparently injurious, as it is the only cause
assigned of a healthy tree’s dying before a less
healthy one of the same age and species, subject
all its life to the same conditions.[44]

So much we have learned about this sapsucker’s
habits, and now we should like to know why
his work is harmful, and why that of the other
woodpeckers is not. It is not because he drinks
the sap. All the sap he could eat or waste
would not harm the tree, if allowed to run out
of a few holes. Think how many gallons the
sugar-makers drain out of a single tree without
killing the tree. But the sugar-maker takes the
sap in the spring, when the crude sap is mounting
up in the tree, while the sapsucker does not
begin his work till midsummer or autumn, when
the tree is sending down its elaborated sap to
feed the trunk and make it grow. This accounts
for the woodpecker’s digging his pits
above the lines of the holes already in the tree.
The loss of this elaborated sap is a greater injury
than the waste of a far larger quantity of
crude sap, so that on the season of the year
when the sapsucker digs his holes depends in
large measure the amount of damage he does.
The injury that he does to the wood itself is
trivial. He is not a woodpecker except at time
of nesting, and most woodpeckers prefer to build
in a dead or dying branch, where their work
does no hurt. But we know very well that a
tree may be a wreck, riven from top to bottom
by lightning, split open to the heart by the tempest,[45]
entirely hollow the whole length of its
trunk, and yet may flourish and bear fruit.
The tree lives in its outer layers. It may be
crippled in almost any way, if the bark is left
uninjured; but if an inch of bark is cut out
entirely around the tree, it will die, for the sap
can no longer run up and down to nourish it.

This is the sapsucker’s crime: he girdles the
tree,—not at his first coming, nor yet at his
second, not with one row of holes, nor yet
with two; but finally, after years perhaps, when
row after row of punctures, each checking a
little the flow of sap, have overlapped and offset
each other and narrowed the channels through
which it could mount and descend, until the flow
is stopped. Then the tree dies. It is not the
holes he makes, nor the sap he draws, but the
way he places his holes that makes the sapsucker
an unwelcome visitor. For an unacceptable
individual he is to the farmer,—persona
non grata, as kings say of ambassadors who do
not please their majesties. What shall we do
with him, the only black sheep in all the woodpecker
flock? Let him alone, unless we are positively
sure that we know him from every other
kind of woodpecker. The damage he does is
trifling compared with what we should do if we
made war upon other woodpeckers for some supposed
wrong-doing of the sapsucker.[46]

VIII

EL CARPINTERO

In California and along the southwestern
boundary of the United States lives a woodpecker
known among the Mexicans as El Carpintero,
the Carpenter.

Carpentering is both his profession and his
pastime, and he seems really to enjoy the work.
When there is nothing more pressing to be done,
he spends his time tinkering around, fitting
acorns into holes in such great numbers and in
so workmanlike a fashion that we do not know
which is more remarkable, his patience or his
skill. Every acorn is fitted into a separate hole
made purposely for it, every one is placed butt
end out and is driven in flush with the surface,
so that a much frequented tree often appears as
if studded with ornamental nails. “What an
industrious bird!” we exclaim; but still it takes
some time to appreciate how enormous is the
labor of the Carpenter. Whole trees will sometimes
be covered with his work, until a single
tree has thousands of acorns bedded into its bark[47]
so neatly and tightly that no other creature can
remove them.

Work of Californian Woodpecker.

We may take for examination, from specimens
of the Carpenter’s work, a piece of spruce bark
seven inches long by six wide, containing ten
acorns and two empty holes. As spruce bark
is so much harder and rougher than the pine[48]
bark in which he usually stores his nuts,[1] this
specimen looks rough and unfinished, and even
shows some acorns driven in sidewise; but for
another reason I have preferred it to better-looking
examples of his work for study. As
we shall see later, it gives us a definite bit of
information about the bird.

Think of the work of digging these twelve
holes. Think of the labor of carrying these ten
large acorns and driving them in so tightly that
after years of shrinking they cannot be removed
by a knife without injuring either the acorn or
the bark. Yet how small a part of the woodpecker’s
year’s work is here! How long could
he live on ten acorns? How many must he
gather for his winter’s needs? How many must
he lose by forgetting to come back to them?
We cannot calculate the work a single bird does
nor the nuts he eats, for several birds usually
work in company and may use the same tree;
but all the woodpeckers are large eaters, and the
Californian has been singled out for special
mention.

Can we estimate the amount of work required
to lay up one day’s food? Judging by the[49]
amount of nuts some other birds will eat, I
should think that all ten acorns contained in this
piece of bark could be eaten in one day without
surfeit. The estimate seems to me well inside
of his probable appetite. I have experimented
on this piece of bark, using a woodpecker’s bill
for a tool, and it takes me twenty minutes to
dig a hole as large but not as neat as these.
Doubtless it would not take the woodpecker as
long; but at my rate of working, four hours
were spent in digging these twelve holes. Then
each acorn had to be hunted up and brought to
the hole prepared for it. This entailed a journey,
it may have been only from one tree to
another, or it may have been, and very likely was,
a considerable flight. For these acorns grew on
oak-trees, and we find them driven into the bark
of pines and spruces.

This it is which gives our specimen its particular
interest. While oaks and pines may be intermingled,
though they naturally prefer different
soils and situations, and in the Rocky Mountains
the pine-belt lies above the oak region, spruce
and oak trees do not grow in the same soil.
The spruce-belt stands higher up than the pine.
As these nuts are stored in the bark of a spruce-tree,
we have clear evidence that the bird must
have carried them some distance. For every[50]
nut he made the whole journey back and forth,
since he could carry but one at a time,—ten
long trips back and forth, certainly consuming
several minutes each.

Then each acorn had to be fitted to its hole.
We have already spoken of the accuracy with
which this is done, so that the Carpenter’s work
is a standing taunt to the hungry jays and
squirrels which would gladly eat his nuts if
they could get them. A careful observer tells
us that when the hole is too small, the woodpecker
takes the acorn out and makes the hole
a little larger, working so cautiously, however,
that he sometimes makes several trials before the
acorn can be fitted and driven in flush with the
bark. Some of these acorns show cracks down
the sides, as if they had been split either in
forcibly pulling them out of a hole not deep
enough for them, or in driving them when
green and soft into a hole too small for them.
Of course after each trial the acorn must be
hunted up where it lies on the ground and
driven in again, and this takes considerable
time.

As nearly as we can estimate it, not less than
half a day must have been spent in putting
these acorns where we find them. With smaller
acorns, stored in pine bark, less time would have[51]
been required; but weeks, if not months, of
work are spent in laying up the winter’s stores.

How the woodpecker’s back and jaws must
have ached! Surely he is human enough to get
tired with his work, and it is not play to do what
this bird has done. Some of the acorns measure
seven tenths of an inch in diameter by nine
tenths in length, and the bird that carried them
is smaller than a robin. How he must have
hurried to reach his tree when the acorn was
extra large! Yet he took time to drive every
one in point foremost. Even those that lie
upon their sides must have been forced into
position by tapping the butt. He knows very
well which end of an acorn is which, does our
Carpenter.

But what is the use of all this work? Why,
if he wants acorns, does he not eat them as they
lie scattered under the oaks, instead of taking
pains to carry them away and put them into
holes for the fun of eating them out of the
holes afterward? The absurdity of this has
led some people to surmise that the Carpenter
chooses none but weevilly acorns, and stores
them that the grub inside may grow large and
fat and delicious. This would be very interesting,
if it were true. There must of course be
more weevilly acorns on the ground than he[52]
picks up, so that he could get as many grubs
without taking all this trouble, and there is no
reason why they should not be as large and
good as those hatched out in holes in trees.
When I wish to keep nuts sweet, I spread them
out on the attic floor in the sun and air, keeping
them where they will not touch each other.
The Carpenter does practically the same thing.
Is it probable that he tries to raise a fine crop
of grubs in this way? If so, one or the other
of us is doing just the wrong thing. But if weevils
are what the Carpenter wants, then the nuts
in the bark should be wormy; yet only two of
them show any sign of a weevil, and of these one
appears from its dull color and weather-beaten
look to be a nut deposited several years before
the others by some other woodpecker. Every
other acorn is as hard, shining, and bright colored
as when it fell from the tree. Evidently the
bird picked these nuts up while they were fresh
and good; perhaps he chose them because they
were good and fresh. The possibility becomes
almost a certainty when we observe that naturalists
agree that the Carpenter uses no acorns
but the sweet-tasting species. Now there are
likely to be as many grubs in one kind of an
acorn as in another, and he would scarcely refuse
any kind that contained them, if grubs[53]
were what he wanted. The fact that he takes
sweet acorns, and those only, shows that it is the
meat of the nut that he wants. And all good
naturalists agree that it is the kernel itself that
he eats.

Why he stores them is not hard to decide
when we remember that the Californian woodpecker,
over a large part of his range, is a
mountain bird. Though we think of California
as the land of sunshine, it is not universal summer
there. The mountain ranges have a winter
as severe as that of New England, with a heavy
snowfall. When the snow lies several feet deep
among the pines and spruces of the uplands, the
Carpenter is not distressed for food: his pantry
is always above the level of the snow; he need
neither scratch a meagre living from the edges
of the snow-banks, nor go fasting. His fall’s
work has provided him not only with the necessities,
but with the luxuries of life.

But why does he spend so much time in making
holes? He might tuck his nuts into some
natural crevice in the oak bark, or drop them
into cavities which all birds know so well where
to find. And leave them where any pilfering
jay would be able to pick them out at his ease?
Or put them in the track of every wandering
squirrel? Jays and squirrels are never too honest[54]
to refuse to steal, but they find it harder
to get the woodpecker’s stores out of his pine-tree
pantry than to pick up honest acorns of
their own. So, like the woodpecker, they lay
up their own stores of nuts, and feed on them
in winter, or go hungry.

We have had very little aid from anything
except the piece of bark we were studying,
yet we have learned that the Californian woodpecker
is a good carpenter; that he works hard
at his trade; that he shows remarkable foresight
in collecting his food, much ingenuity in
housing it, good judgment in putting it where
his enemies cannot get it, and wisdom in the
plan he has adopted to give him a good supply
of fresh nuts at a season when the autumn’s
crop is buried under the deep snow.

If I were a Californian boy, I think I should
spend my time in trying to find out more about
this wise woodpecker, concerning which much
remains to be discovered.[55]

IX

A RED-HEADED COUSIN

Besides his half-brothers, the narrow-fronted
and ant-eating woodpeckers, the Carpenter has
a numerous family of cousins,—the red-headed,
the red-bellied, the golden-fronted, the Gila,[1]
and the Lewis’s woodpeckers. These all belong
to one genus, and are much alike in structure,
though totally different in color. Most of them
are Western or Southwestern birds, but one is
found in nearly all parts of the United States
lying between the Hudson River and the Rocky
Mountains, and is the most abundant woodpecker
of the middle West. This well-known cousin is
the red-headed woodpecker, the tricolored beauty
that sits on fence-posts and telegraph poles, and
sallies out, a blaze of white, steel-blue, and scarlet,
a gorgeous spectacle, whenever an insect
flits by. He is the one that raps so merrily on
your tin roofs when he feels musical.

In many ways the red-head, as he is familiarly
called, is like his carpenter cousin. Both[56]
indulge in long-continued drumming; both catch
flies expertly on the wing; and both have the
curious habit of laying up stores of food for
future use. The Californian woodpecker not
only stores acorns, but insect food as well. But
though the Carpenter’s habits have long been
known, it is a comparatively short time since
the red-head was first detected laying up winter
supplies.

The first to report this habit of the red-head
was a gentleman in South Dakota, who one
spring noticed that they were eating young
grasshoppers. At that season he supposed that
all the insects of the year previous would be
dead or torpid, and certainly full-grown, while
those of the coming summer would be still in
the egg. Where could the bird find half-grown
grasshoppers? Being interested to explain this,
he watched the red-heads until he saw that one
went frequently to a post, and appeared to get
something out of a crevice in its side. In that
post he found nearly a hundred grasshoppers,
still alive, but wedged in so tightly they could
not escape. He also found other hiding-places
all full of grasshoppers, and discovered that the
woodpeckers lived upon these stores nearly all
winter.

But it is not grasshoppers only that the red-head
[57]hoards, though he is very fond of them.
In some parts of the country it is easier to find
nuts than to find grasshoppers, and they are
much less perishable food. The red-head is
very fond of both acorns and beechnuts. Probably
he eats chestnuts also. Who knows how
many kinds of nuts the red-head eats? You
might easily determine not only what he will
eat, but what he prefers, if a red-headed woodpecker
lives near you. Lay out different kinds
of nuts on different days, putting them on a
shed roof, or in some place where squirrels and
blue jays would not be likely to dare to steal
them, and see whether he takes all the kinds
you offer. Then lay out mixed nuts and notice
which ones he carries off first. If he takes all
of one kind before he takes any of the others, we
may be sure that he has discovered his favorite
nut. Such little experiments furnish just the
information which scientific men are glad to get.

It is well known that the red-head is very
fond of beechnuts. Every other year we expect
a full crop of nuts, and close observation shows
that the red-heads come to the North in much
larger numbers and stay much later on these
years of plenty than on the years of scanty
crops. Lately it has been discovered that they
not only eat beechnuts all the fall, but store[58]
them up for winter use. This time the observation
was made in Indiana. There, when the nuts
were abundant, the red-heads were seen busily
carrying them off. Their accumulations were
found in all sorts of places: cavities in old tree-trunks
contained nuts by the handful; knot-holes,
cracks, crevices, seams in the barns were
filled full of nuts. Nuts were tucked into the
cracks in fence-posts; they were driven into
railroad ties; they were pounded in between
the shingles on the roofs; if a board was sprung
out, the space behind it was filled with nuts,
and bark or wood was often brought to cover
over the gathered store. No doubt children
often found these hiding-places and ate the nuts,
thinking they were robbing some squirrel’s
hoard.

In the South, where the beech-tree is replaced
by the oak, the red-heads eat acorns. I
should like to know whether they store acorns
as they do beechnuts. Are chestnuts ever laid
up for winter? How far south is the habit kept
up? Is it observed beyond the limits of a regular
and considerable snowfall? That is, do the
birds lay up their nuts in order to keep them
out of the snow, or for some other reason?

It remains to be discovered if other woodpeckers
have hoarding-places. We know that[59]
the sapsucker eats beechnuts, and the downy
and the hairy woodpeckers also; that the red-bellied
woodpecker and the golden-winged flicker
eat acorns; and I have seen the downy woodpecker
eating chestnuts, or the grubs in them,
hanging head downward at the very tip of the
branches like a chickadee. It may be possible
that some of these lay up winter stores.

Head of the Lewis's Woodpecker.

It is known that the Lewis’s woodpecker occasionally
shows signs of a hoarding instinct. It
was recently noted that in the San Bernardino
Mountains of California the Lewis’s woodpecker,
after driving away the smaller Californian woodpeckers,
tried to put acorns into the holes the
Carpenter had made, but, being unused to the
work, did it very clumsily.
Soon after this observation
was published,
a boy friend living near
Denver told me that a
short time before he had
seen a woodpecker that had a large quantity
of acorns shelled and broken into quarters, on
which he was feeding. This woodpecker was
identified beyond a doubt as the Lewis’s woodpecker.
So we begin to suspect that the habit
of storing up food is not an uncommon one
among the woodpeckers.[60]

X

A STUDY OF ACQUIRED HABITS

Something interesting yet remains to be discovered
of the hoarding habit of the red-head.
How strange that so familiar a bird should have
a habit so easily detected, and yet that no one in
all these years should speak of it! Who does not
know how mice and chipmunks hide their food?
Who has not watched the blue jay skulking off to
hide an acorn where he will be sure to forget it?
Who does not remember the articles his pet Jim
Crow stole and lost to him forever? The hoarding
habit has long been observed of many dull-colored,
rare, or insignificant creatures. That
one so noisy, gay-colored, tame, and abundant
as our red-headed woodpecker should have the
same habit and escape observation is certainly
remarkable. But though it is over twenty years
since the storing of grasshoppers was recorded
and twelve since the practice of laying up beechnuts
was observed, very little seems to have been
learned of the habit since these records were
made.[61]

There are two points to be considered: the
habit long remained unknown; after it was discovered,
it was long in being reaffirmed. It
seems that, if it were a general habit, more
would be known about it. Now if it is not a
universal habit, it must be one of two alternatives,
either a custom falling into disuse, or a
new one just being acquired. That a habit so
remarkable and so advantageous should be discarded
after being universal is scarcely possible;
that a habit so noticeable, if it were general,
should remain unknown is improbable; that a
habit which made life in winter both secure and
easy should, if introduced by a few enterprising
birds, become a universal custom, is not without
a parallel. The probabilities point to the custom
of hoarding food as a recently acquired habit.

Acquired habits are not rare among birds.
The chimney swift has learned to nest in chimneys
since the Pilgrims landed; for there were
no chimneys before that time. There is the evidence
of old writers to show that they acquired
the habit within fifty years of the time of the
first permanent settlements in New England.
The eaves swallow learned to transfer its nest
from the side of a cliff to the side of a barn
in less time. Most birds will change their food
as soon as a new dainty is procurable, and they[62]
will even invent methods of getting it, if it is
much to their taste. The way the English sparrows
have learned to tear open corn husks so as
to eat the corn in the milk is a good example, for
our maize does not grow in England, and they
have had to learn about its good qualities in the
few years since they have become established outside
of the cities. Yet it is already a well-established
habit. So quickly does a habit spread from
one bird to another, until it becomes the rule instead
of the exception! Acquired habits always
show adaptability, and often much forethought
and reason. It is the shrewd bird that learns
new tricks.

Now there is not known among birds any evidence
of greater forethought and reason than
working hard in pleasant weather, when food is
plentiful beyond all hope of ever exhausting it,
to lay up provision for winter. How does the
woodpecker know that winter will come this
year? That there was a winter last year and
the year before does not make it certain, but
only probable, that there will be one this year.
We cannot know ourselves that the seasons will
change until we learn enough of astronomy to
understand the proof. Nor does instinct explain
the habit, as some would declare: since not all
red-heads have the habit, though all must have[63]
instinct. It would seem as if memory and reason
had devised this plan for outwitting winter, the
bird’s old enemy.

The red-head is not a grub-eating woodpecker.
Though beetles make up a third of his food,
their larvæ do not form any part of it. Half his
food for the entire year is vegetable, and the
animal portion is composed principally of beetles,
ants, caterpillars, and grasshoppers, which in winter
time are hidden in snug places, or are dead
under the snow. There are few berries in winter.
The few seedy, weedy plants that stick up
above the snow give to the birds the little they
have; but the red-head’s vegetable fare is limited
at that season and his animal food almost lacking.
Winter in the North is all very well for the
hairy and downy cousins that like to hammer
frozen tree-trunks for frozen grubs; but our
red-headed friend does not eat grubs by preference.
Rather than change his habits he will
change his boarding-place. So he is a migratory
woodpecker, though the woodpeckers are naturally
home-loving birds, and do not migrate from
preference. If, however, he can lay up a store
of vegetable or animal food, he can winter in
any climate. Hoarding is thus an invention as
important to the woodpecker world as electric
cars and telephones are to men. The probabilities[64]
are that this is a recent improvement in
the red-head’s ways of living.

Another set of facts increases the probabilities
of our supposition. It is a very delicate subject
to handle because it affects the reputation of a
family in good standing; but there is positive
proof that sometimes the red-head has been
guilty of crimes which would give a man a full
column in the newspapers with staring headlines.
If such deeds were not a thousand times
less common among woodpeckers than they are
among men the red-head would be declared an
outlaw. He has been proved to be a hen-roost
robber, a murderer, and a cannibal. In Florida
he has sucked hen’s eggs. In Iowa he has been
seen to kill a duckling. There is a record in
Ohio that he pecked holes in the walls of the
eaves swallow’s nest and stole all the eggs, and
that he was finally killed in the act of robbing
a setting hen’s nest. Within the space of fifteen
years, from Montana, Georgia, Colorado,
New York, and Ontario, in addition to the records
mentioned already from Florida, Ohio, and
Iowa, come accounts of his stealing birds’ eggs
and murdering and eating other birds. The
evidence is indisputable.

It is charity to suppose that this is the work of
natural criminals, or of degenerate, under-witted,[65]
or demented woodpeckers. Why should there not
be such individuals among birds? One point is
certain: so notable a habit could not long escape
detection, since it is a barnyard crime. He who
robs hen’s nests gets caught—if he is a bird.
Either these occurrences are very rare, not seen
because of their extreme rarity, or they indicate
a new custom just coming in. And the same is
true of the habit of hoarding food; it is rare, or
it is new.

The frequency of such occurrences can be determined
only by observation; but the time of
their origin might be approximated in another
way. If we could fix the date when the bird
could not have done what he is now doing for
simple lack of opportunity, we might say that the
habit has been acquired since a certain date—as
we have said of the English sparrow eating
maize, of the chimney swift nesting in chimneys,
and the cliff swallow building under the eaves.
But we have no such help on the case of the red-head,
which never has been without opportunities
to get birds’ eggs and to kill other birds.

But there is a parallel case in another species
where the date of an acquired habit can be
proved. In Florida the red-bellied woodpecker
has earned the names Orange Borer and Orange
Sapsucker because he eats oranges. It is true[66]
that he is not charged with doing damage, because
he attacks only the over-ripe and unmarketable
fruit; it is known that the habit is not
general yet, for even where the birds are abundant
only a single bird or a pair will be found
eating oranges, and always the same pair, proving
that it is a habit not yet learned by all of
the species; close observers declare, too, that it is
but a few years since the bird took up the habit;
and, finally, we know that this must be the case,
for, though the wild orange was introduced by
the Spaniards, the sweet fruit was not extensively
cultivated until recently. Here is a habit
which undoubtedly has been acquired within
twenty years or so, which will in all probability
increase until instead of being the exception it
is the rule.

Why may not the red-head’s occasional cannibalism,
unless this is mere individual degeneracy,
and his more common custom of hoarding
be habits that he is acquiring? Why, indeed,
may not the Californian woodpecker’s distinguishing
trait be a habit which began like these
among a few birds here and there, wiser or more
progressive than the rest, and which in time
became general and established? Why may not
the two observed instances of the Lewis’s woodpecker
be examples of a similar habit just beginning?[67]
The very differences in their methods
point to that explanation. The Lewis’s woodpecker
that had seen the Carpenter’s work tried
to imitate him; the one that lived outside his
range adopted a way of his own, unnoticed before
among woodpeckers, and shelled and quartered
his nuts before he stored them.

It is remarkable that these four woodpeckers
are cousins; they belong to the same genus,
and they have essentially the same structure,
tastes, and habits. Why should it be strange if
their minds were alike too? if they had a natural
bent toward accumulativeness, and a natural
desire to try new wrinkles? We are sure that
one of them has acquired a new habit within a
few years. Why may we not suppose as a basis
and a spur to further investigation that the
others also are acquiring ways new and strange?[68]

XI

THE WOODPECKER’S TOOLS: HIS BILL

There is an old saying, “You may know a
carpenter by his chips;” but, though chips are
seldom long absent when a woodpecker is about,
can we call the woodpecker a carpenter? Is he
not both in his works and ways of working—with
the one exception of the Californian woodpecker—more
of a miner?

For the carpenter takes pieces of wood, bit
by bit, and joins them together till at last he
has built a lofty skeleton or framework for his
dwelling, which last of all he covers over and
closes in; and the tools he uses are saw and
hammer. With these alone he could build his
house, though it might be neither very large
nor very good. When a carpenter’s house is
finished, it is neither a cave nor a hole, but a
pavilion built in the open air after the model
of a spreading tree,—which frames a roof with
its branches and shingles it with overlapping
leaves. There is nothing in the woodpecker’s
way of building which corresponds to that.[69]

Quite different are the miner’s methods. In the
West, where the barren mountain sides stretch
up into snowclad summits, on the face of slopes
as seamed and gray and verdureless as the
wrinkled trunk of an aged oak, I have seen
holes where human woodpeckers burrow. The
entrance to a mine half-way up a hillside looks
strikingly like a woodpecker’s hole and scarcely
larger. Nor does the likeness vanish as we
think how in their long tunnels inside their
mountains of gold and iron and silver the delving
miners are picking and prying and picking
to lengthen their burrows just as the woodpeckers
peck and pry and peck inside their wooden
mountain, the tree-trunk. Which shall we call
the woodpecker—a carpenter or a miner?

What are the miner’s tools? Pick and drill,
are they not? What are the woodpecker’s?
The same. Certainly we shall see, if we stop to
think, that it is not a chisel that he uses, as we
sometimes say. A chisel is a knife driven by
blows of a hammer; like a knife its effectiveness
depends upon the sharpness and length of
its cutting edge. But a woodpecker’s bill is not
a cutting tool. It is a wedge, but a wedge working
on a different principle from a knife-edge.
Look at this one and observe that, though strong
and stout, it is not sharp and has no true cutting[70]
edge. It is a tapering, square-ended, flat-sided
tool, rather six-sided at the base and
holding its bevel and angles to the tip. The
woodpecker’s bill is a pick, not a chisel. It is
used like a pick, being driven home with a heavy
blow and getting its efficiency from its own
weight and wedge-shape and from the force with
which it is impelled. Watch the downy woodpecker
at his work and see what sturdy blows
he delivers, pausing after each one to aim and
drive home another telling stroke. This is pick-axe
work. But sometimes he rattles off a succession
of taps so short and quick that they
blend together in one continuous drumming, too[71]
light and quick to be likened to the ponderous
swing of the pick-axe. Now he is drilling. The
work of a drill is to cut out a small deep hole
either by twirling (as in drilling metals) or by
tapping (as in drilling stone). The woodpecker
drills by the latter method and there is a curious
likeness between his bill and the mason’s tools.

Head of Ivory-billed Woodpecker.

Any one who has lived in a granite country
knows the deep round holes that stone masons
make when they split rock. Did you ever wonder
why they are as large at the bottom as at
the top? If you remember the shape of a mason’s
drill, you will recollect that it looks a little
like a stick of home-made molasses candy bitten
off when it was just soft enough to stretch a
little. The mason’s drill is a round iron rod
with a thin, flat end, sharpened on the edge and
a little pointed in the centre. In the flattening
of the sides and the width across the tip its
end resembles that of a typical woodpecker’s
bill. The woodpeckers that drill for grubs, especially
the largest, the logcock and the ivory-billed
woodpecker, have the tip remarkably flattened.
The likeness to the drill does not go
farther because the woodpecker’s bill is a combination
tool; but it is drill-pointed rather than
pick-pointed.

What is the advantage of this compressed[72]
tip? Can the bird pick as well as he could
with a sharp point? The bird and the mason
reap the same benefit from this form of tool.
A sharp-pointed drill would bind in the hole
and could neither be driven ahead nor removed
without difficulty, but the sharp-edged tool cuts
a hole as wide as the instrument. There is, of
course, some difference between working in stone
and in wood, but the principle is the same. The
mason strikes his drill with his hammer and cuts
a crease in the stone; then lifts and turns the
drill, cutting a crease in another direction; and
so by continually changing the direction of the
cuts until they radiate from a centre like the
spokes of a wheel, he finally reduces a little
circle of stone to a powder fine enough to be
blown out of the hole. In drilling for a grub
the woodpecker must do much the same thing.
He wishes to keep his hole small at the top so
as to save work, yet it must be large enough
at the bottom to admit the borer when nipped
between his mandibles; therefore he needs an
instrument that, like a drill or a chisel, will cut
a straight-sided hole. Indeed, we might call it
a chisel just as well if it were not a double-wedge
instead of a single wedge and if it did
not move when it is struck instead of being
held stationary beneath the blows.[73]

When he is digging his house the woodpecker
uses his bill as a pick-axe. When he is digging for
grubs he uses it as a drill. Now some species
drill very little and some a great deal, according
to the number of grubs they feed on; but
all dig holes to nest in,—that is, all use their
bills as picks but only a few employ them as
drills. The flickers, for example, seldom drill
for grubs, their food being picked up on the surface
or dug from the earth; yet they excavate
the deepest, roomiest holes made by any woodpeckers
of their size; they use their bills effectively
as pick-axes, but seldom, very seldom, as
drills. And what do we find? No drill-point—not
a truncate, compressed bill fit for drilling,
but a sharper, pointed, rounded, curving bill.
Notice the ordinary pick-axe and see how much
nearer the flicker’s bill than the logcock’s or the
ivory-billed woodpecker’s it is. Why is a flicker’s
bill better for being curved also? Why do the
drilling woodpeckers have a perfectly straight
bill? We should find by studying the birds
and their food that there is a direct relation
between the shape of the bill and the amount of
drilling a woodpecker does; that the grub-eating
or drilling woodpeckers have a straight bill, for
working in small deep holes, while the flickers
have a curved bill for prying out chips. And[74]
we should note that the flicker’s bill is most like
the ordinary bill of perching birds, while the
drilling bill, as typified by the logcock’s and
the hairy woodpecker’s bills, is a more specialized
tool, limited to fewer uses, but more effective
within its limits.

There is another detail of the woodpecker’s
bills which casts light upon their habits. The
species that drill most have their nostrils closely
covered by little tufts of stiff feathers, scarcely
more than bristles, which turn forward over the
nostril. The density and the length of these
tufts agree very well with the kind of work the
woodpecker does; for in the hairy and the downy,
which are continually drilling and raising a dust
in rotten wood, they are very thick and noticeable,
while in the red-head and the sapsucker they
show as scarcely more than a few loose bristles,
and in the flicker they barely cover the nostril.
This seems a plain provision to keep the dust
out of the bird’s lungs; and we might cite as
additional evidence the fact that the only other
birds of similar tree-pecking habits, the nuthatches
and the chickadees, have their nostrils
protected in the same way. But we must always
be cautious before drawing inferences of
this sort to see what may be said on the other
side. When we recollect that the crows and[75]
ravens and many kinds of finches, among other
birds, none of which dig in the bark of trees or
raise a dust, have their nostrils as completely
covered, we see that we have perhaps discovered
a use for these nasal tufts but not the cause of
their being there. We must be careful not to
mistake cause and accompaniment in our endeavor
to explain differences in structure.

Let us see what we have learned and how to
interpret it:—

That the woodpecker’s bill is a combination of
drill and pick-axe.

That the shape varies with the use to which it
is most commonly put.

That the use varies with the food principally
eaten; or, what is a step farther back, that the
different kinds of food must be sought in different
places and by different methods, and therefore
require different tools.

Therefore the shape of the woodpecker’s bill
has a direct relation to the kind of food he eats.
Please notice that we do not assert that it causes
him to eat a certain kind of food nor that a certain
diet may not have affected the shape of the
bill, causing it to be what we now see. Both
may be at least partially true, but to prove
either or both would need profound study, and
all that we have observed is that the shape of[76]
the woodpecker’s bill is adapted to his food and
that it varies with the kind of food he eats,
or, to be more exact, with his ways of procuring
it.[77]

XII

THE WOODPECKER’S TOOLS: HIS FOOT

We have studied the woodpecker’s bill and
have found that it is a very serviceable tool. We
shall find that his feet are equally well adapted
to their work.

Here is the foot of a woodpecker. Observe
how it differs from a chicken’s foot,
or a sparrow’s foot. What is it
that especially fits it for climbing?
Perhaps you will notice that the
tarsus is short, and you may be able
to explain why it would be a disadvantage
for a climbing bird to
have long legs, as well as why it is
a help for him to have long toes. Toes long
and legs short is the rule with the woodpeckers.

Foot of Woodpecker.

I never see a woodpecker’s foot without thinking
of an iceman’s nippers with their short
handles and long, sharp-toothed jaws. They are
designed for similar uses,—to lift heavy weights
by laying hold of smooth, flat surfaces. The
iceman sets his nippers into the ice and lifts the[78]
block; but the bird sets his claws into the tree
and lifts his own body.

Suppose the nippers had one short jaw and one
long one, would they then take as firm hold as
they do with jaws of equal length? In perching
birds the hind toe is much the shortest, but
they sit balanced upon a limb and have merely
to hold themselves in position. The woodpecker
climbing a tree-trunk is out of balance;
he would fall off unless he had a firm grip;
and he could not get this firm hold if his hind
toes were not long enough to give his foot a
nearly equal spread back and forward. Other
birds grasp a limb with the whole under surface
of their toes, but the woodpecker when on a
smooth, upright tree-trunk nips it only with his
toenails. Try with your own hand to hold a
stick as large and heavy as you can grasp, and
you will see that when you clasp your hand
around it as a perching bird takes hold of a
perch, it makes little difference that the thumb
is shorter than the fingers, but when you try to
nip it with your finger tips alone, you must bend
your fingers until they are not much longer than
your thumb,—that is, a pair of nippers must be
equal jawed.

This simple illustration shows why the woodpecker’s
foot reaches as far backward as forward.[79]
But a sensible objection may be raised,
namely, that as there are two hind toes of unequal
length, it is by no means certain which is
the more necessary.

Diagram of right foot.

Scientists tell us that a woodpecker’s foot,
though it looks so unlike a chicken’s, is really
very much the same. When we ask how one
of the front toes disappeared and
how the extra hind toe came to be
where it is, they tell us that there
has been no addition and no loss,
but the extra hind toe is only a
front toe turned backward. They
call it a reversed fourth toe. A
bird’s toes are numbered in order
starting with the hind toe and going
around the inside of the foot
to the outer or fourth toe. The hind toe is the
thumb, and the others are numbered in the same
order as the fingers of our hands. So we see
that the woodpecker’s real hind toe is rather
small, like that of most birds. It looks very
much as if it had been found too small and as if
another had turned back to help it do its work.
Do you say that a bird cannot turn his toes
about in this way? Most cannot, to be sure,
but all of the owls can do it. An owl will sit
either with two toes forward and two backward,[80]
or with three forward and one the other way.
The owls have a reversible outer toe, and perhaps
the woodpeckers did also before it became
permanently reversed.

Foot of Three-toed Woodpecker.

That this is exactly what had happened is curiously
confirmed. There are a few woodpeckers
in this country which have but three toes. They
are the only North
American land birds
with less than four toes
(though many sea and
shore birds have but
three). Compare this
picture with a four-toed woodpecker’s foot. One
toe is gone completely, when or how no one can
tell. But in some way the first toe, the thumb,
the one we always begin to count from, has disappeared.
The one left is the reversed fourth
toe, as we know by the number of joints in it.
Undoubtedly this woodpecker needed a hind toe,
but he must have needed a longer, stronger one
than his natural first toe. A toe of the right
length was supplied by turning one of the front
toes back, and the short hind toe in some way
disappeared.

This may seem a roundabout way to show
that a woodpecker’s foot is a pair of nippers.
First we studied nippers till we found out that[81]
they were not good nippers unless they were
nearly equal-limbed. Next we studied the woodpecker’s
foot to learn about that extra hind toe.
Then it occurred to us that four toes were not
necessary, since some of our best climbers have
but three. What was the essential point?
Might it not be a foot equally divided without
reference to the number of toes? But that is
the principle of a pair of nippers. Then came
the question, is there any similarity in their use?
Yes, the nippers are used to lift heavy weights,
and the woodpecker’s foot is used to lift his
heavy body in just the same way, by taking
hold of a flat, smooth surface. We conclude
that a wide-spread, equally divided, nipping foot
would be the best device possible for the woodpecker’s
way of living, and we find by examination
that every woodpecker shows this type of
foot.

There is additional evidence that this is the
right explanation. Our only other North American
birds that climb on the bark of trees professionally,
as we may say, are the brown creepers
and the nuthatches. In both these the tarsus is
short, as we found it in the woodpeckers, and
the hind toe and its claw are fully equal to the
middle toe and claw, making an equally divided
foot. On the other hand, the foot with two toes[82]
forward and two toes backward is confined neither
to woodpeckers nor to climbing birds. The
parrots, which climb after a fashion, have it;
but so do the cuckoos, which do not climb, some
of which, like our road-runner, or ground cuckoo
of the West, are strictly terrestrial. The “yoking”
of the toes may occur by the reversion of
the fourth toe, as ordinarily, or of the second
toe, as in the trogons; the arrangement appears
to be definitely related to the distribution of the
tendons that control the toes. But though accounting
for the structure may give a clue to its
descent, it does not justify its efficiency. The
yoke-toed foot is not exclusively a climbing foot.
All our families of climbers have at least one
representative with but one toe behind, and this
clearly proves that the yoke-toed structure is by
no means necessary even though it may be an
honorable inheritance among climbers. The
natural conclusion is that the important point in
climbing is not the number nor the arrangement
of the toes, but the length of at least one hind
toe so as to give an equally divided foot.

There is an interesting point to notice about
the woodpeckers. This reversed fourth toe is
curiously variable in length. In the flickers,
with its claw, it is a little shorter than the middle
(third) toe with its claw; in the red-heads and[83]
their friends it a little exceeds the middle toe
and claw; in the downy and the hairy it is much
the longest toe, and in the ivory-billed woodpecker
it is abnormally developed. We at once
judge that it is some indication of the bird’s
manner of life, and we look for it to be largest
in the species that live continually upon the
trunks of trees, obtaining most of their food by
drilling. We expect to see the finest development
of drilling bill accompany this enormously
developed toe, and we find them both in the
ivory-billed woodpecker. In imagination we
clearly see the use of it. The great bird, keen
in his quest of grubs, sidling hastily round the
tree, in an unsteady balance and unsupported by
his tail, throws one long hind toe downward
to steady himself, hooks the other into the bark
above him, and hangs between the two as firmly
supported as in his ordinary position. No doubt
he does do this, but does it prove the supposition
that the heaviest and most arboreal woodpeckers
have the greatest development of the
fourth toe? Not at all. There is our rare acquaintance
the logcock, or pileated woodpecker,
a bird nearly as large as the ivory-billed, one of
the most persistent of our tree-climbers and more
than any other woodpecker I ever observed given
to scratching rapidly round and round a tree-trunk,[84]
clinging at ease in almost any position
except head-downward, and drilling incessantly
and at all seasons for grubs; he is a typical
woodpecker of the largest size, but his hind toe
and claw are, if anything, a trifle shorter than
his middle toe with its claw. He throws it out
and uses it as we have described, but it has not
that disproportion to the other toes which we
expected to find as the result of a strictly arboreal
life.

What have we proved? We have not shown
that the long toe is not more useful than the
shorter one,—that is a matter of observation;
but we have failed entirely to show that it is so,
and this can be done only in one of two ways:
either by proving that the logcock’s habits are
not what all previous observers have believed
them to be,—which would be assuming a great
burden of proof; or by demonstrating that his
ancestry explains why his feet do not illustrate
our theory,—and this, though it is undoubtedly
the true solution, could be settled only by a very
learned man.

But we have encountered one truth which
must always be held in mind in science—that
a theory is not proved while a single fact remains
rebellious and unsubdued. We might
have examined every other woodpecker in the[85]
continent but just one; we might have seen that
every other one agreed with our theory, as it
does; we might have supposed that the explanation
was good past doubting; but that one exception—if
it was a logcock—would still over-turn
the whole theory; and the very facts that
we relied upon to strengthen us—its resemblance
in size, habits, shape, and color to the
ivory-billed woodpecker—have been the strongest
possible means of totally demolishing our
fine theory. We have learned, if nothing more,
that all the facts must be examined and accounted
for before an explanation is accepted as
indisputable.[86]

XIII

THE WOODPECKER’S TOOLS: HIS TAIL

If we study the woodpecker’s anatomy and
observe his broad, strong, highly-arched hip-bones
and the heavy, triangular “ploughshare”
bone in which the tail feathers are planted, as
well as the stiffness and strength of the tail itself,
we must conclude that it is not by accident
that he uses his tail as a prop. The whole
structure shows that the bird was intended “to
lean on his tail.” What we wish to discover is
how good a tail it is to lean on.

Tail of Hairy Woodpecker.

Our first impression is that the woodpecker’s
tail might be improved.
Why are
not the tips of the
feathers stiffer?
Why is it so
rounded? Most of
the work seems to
fall on the middle
feathers, and in
some species, as the downy and the hairy woodpeckers,[87]
these end in decurved tips so soft and
unresisting that they seem quite unfit to give
any support. Would it not be better if the
woodpecker’s tail had been cut square across
and made of feathers equally rigid and ending
in short stiff spines? For we see that the woodpecker’s
tail is not only weak in its inner feathers,
but weaker still in its outer ones, and it is
stiff, in most species, only in the upper three
fourths of its length.

When we propose a change in nature it is
wise to inquire whether our improvement has
not been tried before and to learn how it worked.
How many kinds of birds have we that use
their tails for a support? What are their habits
and what sort of tails have they?

Tails of Brown Creeper (under surface)
and Chimney Swift (upper surface.)

Besides the woodpeckers we have but two kinds
of land birds that prop themselves with their tails,—the
swifts and
the creepers. The
creeper has a tail
very much like the
woodpecker’s as it
is; while the chimney
swift’s is precisely
like the woodpecker’s
as we
thought it ought to be. But we observe that[88]
while the creeper’s habits are almost precisely
like the woodpecker’s,—so much so that when
we first make his acquaintance, some of us will
be sure we have discovered a new kind of woodpecker,—the
chimney swift has but one habit
in common with the woodpecker, that of clinging
to an upright surface and propping himself
by his tail. If the bird with the tail most like
the woodpecker’s has the woodpecker’s habits,
is it not a fair inference that this form of tail is
better fitted to this way of living than the other
would be?

Next, what variations in shapes do we observe
among the woodpeckers themselves? The logcock
and the ivory-billed woodpecker have the
longest tails—because they are the largest
birds. When we compare the length of the
tails with the length of the birds we are surprised
at the results. On measuring sixteen species,
representing seven genera, I find that the tail is
from three tenths to thirty-five hundredths of the
entire length; that it is, in proportion, as long
in the flicker as in the ivory-bill, as long in the
downy as in the logcock, and longer (in the
specimens measured) in the almost wholly terrestrial
flicker than in the wholly arboreal logcock.
Without much more study all that we can safely
infer is that the woodpecker’s tail is not far from[89]
one third the length of his whole body measured
from the tip of the bill to the tip of the tail.
Probably this is the proportion most convenient
for his work.

Middle tail feathers of Flicker, Ivory-billed
Woodpecker, and Hairy Woodpecker.

All woodpeckers’ tails agree in one particular:
they are rounded at the end. At first sight we
would say that some are but slightly rounded
and others very deeply graduated; but as nearly
as I can determine this is at least partly an optical
illusion, explained by the great difference in the
shape of the feathers making up the tail, which
in some, as the flicker, are very broad and abruptly
pointed, and in others taper gradually to
the end and are very narrow for their length.
The larger birds naturally appear to have longer
tails, and the effect of narrow feathers is to
make the tails appear longer and more sharply
graduated than they really are. This diagram[90]
shows the shape of the curve in six species, and
indicates that, while the curvature
is less than we might
expect, it bears some relation
to the bird’s way of living;
for we see that the strictly
arboreal woodpeckers have
more pointed tails than the
terrestrial species, and that
the amount of gradation
bears a direct relation to the
amount of time spent upon
the tree-trunks.

There is a third difference,
the shape of the individual
feather, to which we shall refer
again; but now we wish to
examine the uses and meaning
of the curved end.

Diagram of curvature of
tails of Woodpeckers.
Drawn to scale.

I will show you how to
prove this point so that you
may be satisfied about it even
if you should never see a
woodpecker. We will make
a little experiment, so simple
that even a child can understand it.

First, how many shapes can any bird’s tail
have? It may be one of three general patterns,[91]
and it can be nothing else unless we combine
those patterns. It may be square across the
end, it may have the middle feathers longest,
or it may have the outer feathers longest. To
one of these patterns every form of birds’ tails
may be referred; you can invent no other shape.

Let us assume that you know nothing whatever
of a woodpecker’s tail except that it has
ten feathers, is used as a prop, and is held at
an angle of thirty or forty degrees with the tree-trunk.
Now, take three strips of paper of the
same width and length, and of any size not inconveniently
small. Fold them all down the
centre. Cut one square across; cut one with a
rounded end and the third with a forked end,
making them of any shape you please so long
as the three papers are of the same length. To
give our models
a fair test they
must be of the
same width and
length. Next, pin
a sheet of paper
of any size you
please into the
form of a cylinder and stand it on end to represent
a tree-trunk. Then fit the patterns to
the tree-trunk and see which is the form that
would give the most support.

Patterns of tails.

[92]

But first, in how many ways is it possible for
a bird to use his tail as a prop? He may of
course hold it open or closed; and the open tail
may be held in a single plane, “spread flat,” as
we say; or curved up at the edges, like a crow
blackbird’s; or curved down at the edges. And
the closed tail may be held in a single plane;
or, by dropping each pair of feathers a little, in
several planes. Thus we see there are five positions
in which each shape may be held against
the cylinder of paper. Try each one against it,
holding it first in the open positions and then
after folding the paper like a bird’s tail with
the outer feathers underneath, in the closed positions.
The size of the model tree-trunk and
the shape you cut your curves will make the results
vary a little, but you will be surprised to
observe, if your models are not too small, how
many times you will get the same answers.
Note the number and position of the pairs that
touch:

Which shape brings the most feathers into use
[93]
in all positions? Which positions bring most
feathers into use? We see at once that the
rounded end has a decided advantage, that the
middle pair of feathers is used in all possible
positions, that the pair next outside is the next
important, and that the spread tail curving
downward at the edges and the closed tail in different
planes are the two shapes which give the
best support. There is therefore a reason for the
rounded end which we said was the rule among
the woodpeckers.

Our little experiment is what we call a deduction.
It shows us what we ought to expect
under certain imaginary conditions. But it does
not show us what actually exists, so there often
comes a time when our deductions are faulty because
Nature has done some unexpected thing, as
when we found the single exception of the logcock’s
foot upsetting a fine theory of ours. A
deduction must always be compared with facts,
and is worth little or nothing if a single fact of
the series we are studying is not explained by
it. This time all the facts do agree; for I had,
before we made our experiment, examined the
tails of every species of woodpecker ever found
in North America, and there was no exception to
the rounded end. I had already drawn my conclusion[94]
that this form was better adapted to life
on a tree-trunk than the square or the forked
tail would be, reasoning by a different process
called induction. An induction examines many,
and, if possible, all the facts before drawing any
conclusion; a deduction examines the facts after
the conclusion is reached. There is no hard-and-fast
line between the two kinds of reasoning, but
we may say that a deduction is reasoning out a
guess and an induction is guessing out a reason.
Deductions are easier and quicker; inductions
are surer, and in preparing them we often
make other discoveries.

The rounded tail is no doubt the best; but
we have yet to decide whether the sharper curve
is more advantageous than the lesser curve, as
we thought probable from our observations.
And there is still another deduction from our
experiment which we did not make. If in the
rounded tail the middle pairs of feathers do most
of the work, and if use increases the size and
efficiency of a part, which is almost an axiom in
science, we should expect to find the middle tail
feathers not only strongest in all woodpeckers
but also strongest in increasing ratio in the
species that use them most. To determine this
we must study the use of the tail and the structure
and shape of the individual tail feathers.[95]

We should remark, perhaps, that the woodpecker’s
tail is always composed of twelve feathers—ten
pointed rectrices and two tiny abortive
feathers so short and so hidden that no attention
is paid to them. The ten principal feathers are
arranged in corresponding pairs numbered from
the outside to the centre as first, second, third,
fourth, and fifth pairs.

In the flickers all ten feathers have wide vanes
and are similar in everything but the shape; all
are more or less pointed. The flicker’s tail looks
and feels very much like that of any other bird
except that the shafts are stiffer and the vanes
contract to an acuminate tip. But as we take
up the other species we notice a change, not only
in the shape of the feathers but much more in
their texture and in the difference between the
various pairs. While in the flicker four pairs
out of five are pointed and all are rigid, in
the downy and the hairy three pairs out of five
seem to be too soft to give any support, the
sharp points have disappeared, and the tail has
lost much of its stiffness. The two middle pairs
of feathers are the only ones capable of doing
much work and they are wavering and infirm at
the tips where we should expect them to be
strongest. In the logcock it is about the same,—two
pairs are apparently unfit for work, one[96]
pair is infirm, and the two middle pairs are compelled
to give all the support, except the little
contributed by the third pair. In the ivory-billed
woodpecker the two outer pairs are of no
assistance and the three central ones do the
work, and here again we find the base of the
rectrices rigid and inflexible and the last fourth
of their length weak and yielding. But what a
difference in the individual feather! It is well
able to do all the work; for, except for that weak
tip which we cannot now explain, it is one of the
toughest and strongest feathers to be found.
The shaft is broad and flat, as elastic as a watch-spring;
it looks like a band of burnished steel
as it runs down between the vanes. And the
vanes themselves are of a very curious pattern.
They curl under at the edges so that we do not
see their whole width, and the barbs crowd so
thickly upon each other that they over-lie until
they present an edge three or four broad. Indeed,
the under side of one of these tail feathers
reminds one of nothing so much as of the under
side of a star-fish’s arm with its two long lines
of ambulacral suckers on each side of a central
groove, so thickly do the spiny vanes of these
strong rectrices over ride and crowd together.
These spines lay hold of the bark of the tree,
rank after rank, hundreds of bristling points[97]
that cannot be dislodged except by a forward
motion of the bird or by lifting the tail. Compared
with this, the spiny points on the flicker’s
tail were a poor invention. This device, which
takes hold like a wool card, or a wire hair-brush,
cannot slip from place. We begin to see, too, the
use of that weak and flexible tip; it is to press
down upon the tree-trunk a flat surface sufficiently
large to hold hundreds of these little
spiny points against the bark. The ivory-bill
braces against this with the stiff upper part of
the shaft and has a support that will not slip.
The upper part of the shaft acts like a spring
also, and adds tremendous force to the blow
of the bill. Watch a hairy woodpecker when
hard at work and see how his legs and tail
form a triangular base by bracing against each
other, and how his blow is delivered, not with
the head alone, but with the whole body, swinging
from the hips, the apex of the triangle on
which he rests. He swings like a man wielding
a sledge hammer, and to the strength of his neck
adds the weight of his body, the spring of his[98]
tail, and the momentum of a blow delivered from
a greater height. When the little hairy woodpecker
does so much with his weak body, we can
imagine what great birds like the logcock and
the ivory-billed woodpecker, with their tremendous
beaks, their huge claws, their springy tails,
and their great physical strength can do. They
are magnificent birds, the terror of all the grubs
that hide in tree-trunks.

Under side of middle tail feather of
Ivory-billed Woodpecker.

One point we have left unexplained: What
is the advantage, if there is any, in the sharper
curve to the tails of the arboreal woodpeckers?
It is a simple question. The curve is caused by
the unequal length of the tail feathers; each
tail feather is a prop, and by their inequality
they become props of different lengths. Now
ask any carpenter which will best support a
tottering wall—props all of the same length
set at the same angle, or props of different
lengths set at different angles? His answer
will help you to solve the problem. But if a
little is good, why are not all the pairs used as
props? Partly, perhaps, because the woodpecker
is always crowded for houseroom, and while he
must have tail enough, he cannot afford to have
any which he does not use. Did you ever think
what an inconvenience any tail at all must be in
a woodpecker’s hole?[99]

XIV

THE WOODPECKER’S TOOLS: HIS TONGUE

We have seen how the woodpecker spears his
grubs: now we will study his spear.

Tongue of Hairy Woodpecker. (After Lucas.)

There are many interesting points
about a woodpecker’s tongue, and they
are not hard to understand. If a woodpecker
would kindly let us take hold of
his tongue and pull it out to its full extent
we should be afraid we were “spoiling
his machinery,” for the tongue can
be drawn out almost incredibly—between
two and three inches in a hairy
woodpecker and more in a flicker. A
strange-looking object it is, much resembling
an angle-worm in form, color,
and feeling; for it is round, soft, and
sticky, except at the flat, horny, bayonet-pointed
tip, and as it lies in the mouth it
is wrinkled like the wrist of a loose glove;
but it grows smaller and smoother the more we
pull it out. Evidently we are only drawing it
into its skin. But where does so much tongue[100]
come from? Does it stretch like a piece of
elastic cord? Or is a part hidden somewhere?
And if so, where is it kept?

Tongue-bones of Flicker. (After Lucas.)

These questions are answered by studying the
bones of the tongue, for without bones it could
not be guided as swiftly and surely as it is. Indeed,
all tongues have bones in them, as you will
discover by cutting carefully the slices near the
root of an ox-tongue; but no other creature
has such long and elaborate tongue-bones as
some of the woodpeckers. They are the slenderest
and most delicate
little bony rods,
joined end to end,
but not really hinged
nor needing to be,
because they are so
elastic. Here are the
bones of a flicker’s
tongue. The little
knob at the end,
marked a, bore the
horny point of the
tongue and directed
it; the straight shaft
marked b was inside
the round part of the
tongue as it lay within the bird’s mouth; but[101]
what was done with these two long branches,
fully three quarters of the entire length of the
bones? They are too sharply curved to pass
down the bird’s throat, and, not being jointed,
they cannot be doubled back in his mouth.
They were
tucked away
very neatly
and curiously.
As the hyoid
or tongue-bone
lies in the
mouth its
branches diverge just in front of the gullet, and,
traveling along the inner sides of the fork of
the lower jaw, pass up over the top of the skull,
looking in their sheath of muscles like two tiny
whipcords. But still the bones are too long by
perhaps half an inch for the place they occupy,
and the ends must be neatly disposed of. Usually
both pass to the right nasal opening and
along the hollow of the upper mandible. Very
rarely they may curl down around the eyeball in
a spiral spring. So when the flicker thrusts out
his tongue he feels the pull in the end of his
nose, for the tip of the tongue being run out, the
long slender bones are drawn out of their hiding-places,
down over the skull until they lie flat[102]
along the roof of his mouth. As soon as he
wishes to shut his bill, back fly the little bones
guided by their hollow sheaths of elastic muscle
into their hiding-place in the top of the bill.
The muscular covering is a part of the same soft
envelope that we saw lying in wrinkles at the
root of the tongue. It covers the whole length[103]
of the little bones just as the woven outside
covers an elastic cord.

Skull of Woodpecker, showing bones of tongue.

Hyoids of Sapsucker and Golden-fronted Woodpecker.

Not all woodpeckers have tongues precisely
like this. The sapsucker’s is the shortest of any,
and reaches barely beyond the hinge of the
jaws. In the Lewis’s woodpecker and others of
his genus the branches of the hyoid extend part-way
up the back of the skull but in the kinds
that live principally upon borers they are very
long and resemble the flicker’s in arrangement.
The only other North American birds that have
a tongue built upon this plan are the hummingbirds,
in which also it is extensile. The flicker,
in proportion to his size, has the longest tongue
of any bird known.[104]

XV

HOW EACH WOODPECKER IS FITTED FOR HIS
OWN KIND OF LIFE

We have studied the woodpeckers at some
length: first, what all of them do; next, what
some that are peculiar in their ways do; lastly,
how each is fitted for a particular kind of life.
At first we were inclined to think they were all
alike; but now we begin to see that there are
very real differences between them,—in tails,
feet, bills, and tongues, and at the same time in
their food and habits.

The flicker’s tail is less sharply curved than
that of any other woodpecker,—a sign that he
is probably not exclusively a tree-dweller; his
bill is curved and rounded, a pick-axe rather than
a drill,—an indication that he does not dig for
grubs; his feet do not tell us much; but his
long extensile tongue shows that, whatever he
feeds upon, he seeks it in holes. We find a
tongue like this in no other bird, but among
mammals the aard-vark, the ant-bear, and the
pangolins are all similarly equipped, and all live[105]
on ants which they extract from their mounds and
burrows in hundreds by means of these round,
sticky, and extensile tongues. This is precisely
the way the flicker gets his living. He lives
principally upon the ground or near it, pecks
very little except when digging his nest, and
feeds largely upon ants, thrusting his head into
the ant-hills and drawing out the ants glued to
his tongue rather than speared by it. As he
has been known to eat three thousand ants for a
meal, we see how much easier this is than spearing
them one by one.

The red-head is another type. The bill is
still nearly of the pick-axe model, the feet not
especially different from the flicker’s, the tail
rather better adapted to life on a tree-trunk, and
the tongue entirely unlike the flicker’s,—not
very extensile and heavily clothed near the tip
with long, thick, recurved bristles. We infer
that though he may climb well, he is not a drilling
woodpecker to any great extent, and that
his tongue is adapted neither to extracting borers
nor to eating ants from their burrows. His
habits bear out the inference. He is arboreal,
but his food is either vegetable or picked up
from the surface, rasped up rather than speared.

The sapsucker presents still another variation.
The points to the tail feathers are more acuminate[106]
and the tail itself more resembles that of
the tree-dwelling woodpeckers in shape; the feet
are fitted for clinging to the trunk; the bill,
now perfectly straight and no longer smoothly
rounded but buttressed by strong angles that
spring from the base and run down toward the
tip, is the bill of a woodpecker that lives by
drilling; but the tongue is wholly unadapted
to catching grubs. What kind of food can an
arboreal woodpecker with a drilling bill find
upon a tree-trunk when his tongue can be extended
only a fifth of an inch, and is furnished
with a brush of bristles at the end? We have
answered that question before: he eats the inner
bark of trees and laps up the sap, for which
this brushy tip is excellently fitted. It has been
observed that the tongue much resembles the
tongues of insect-eating birds, which cannot be
extended beyond the end of the bill. It is true
that the sapsucker catches great numbers of insects,
taking them on the wing like a flycatcher.
But he also eats nearly as many ants as the
flicker, though their tongues are totally unlike.
We have made the mistake perhaps of thinking
that ants live only underground and can be
obtained only by tongues like those of the
flicker and the ant-bear, which hunt them there.
But ants are abundant on the surface of the[107]
ground, and they excavate long tunnels in rotten
wood. The black bear is a famous ant-hunter,
yet his tongue is like a dog’s and he gets
his ants by lapping them up after he has torn
open the rotten logs in which they live. This
is the way that the sapsucker obtains his ants,
and the brush of stiff hairs is a help to him in
such work. We see, then, that it is not so
much the food as the manner of feeding that
explains the form of the tongue.

The downy and the hairy are a step farther
along in their development. The fourth toe is
longer than the others, a condition that we do
not find in any of the woodpeckers not strictly
arboreal; the tail is of the improved pattern,
holding by a brush of bristles rather than by one
stiff point at the end of each feather; the bill is
heavier, broader at the base, more heavily ridged,
and in every way a stronger tool; and the tongue
is highly extensible and of the spear pattern,
sharp-pointed and barbed with recurved hooks.
Everything about these birds indicates that they
are fitted to live on tree-trunks and to dig for
borers. This, indeed, is what they do.

But the great logcock and the ivory-billed
woodpecker, though of the same type as the
other larvæ-eating woodpeckers, are more highly
developed along the same line. We notice the[108]
great strength of the feet; the claws, as large
and as sharp as a cat’s; the enormous weight
and strength of the bill, compared with that of
the other woodpeckers, which enables them to
cut into the hardest wood and even into frozen
green timber; and the great development of the
tail, which now becomes a strong spring to support
and aid the bird in his work.

As we try to group these particulars under
general heads, we see that we have observed
three things:—

That the structure of a bird is adapted to its
kind of life.

That the structure varies by small degrees
with the kind of life.

That the kind of life is conditioned largely
upon the kind of food and upon the method of
procuring it, more particularly the latter.

These are not so much different truths as
three aspects of one truth. When we study the
first we see why birds are grouped together into
orders and families: we study their resemblances.
When we observe the second we see
why they are divided into species, for we note
their differences. But when we consider the
third and reflect that birds have the power to
choose new kinds of food or new places and
means of getting it, we see how it is that there[109]
can come to be new kinds of birds, new subspecies
and species, springing up from time to
time. Wonderful and improbable as it seems,
there is more reason to believe than there is to
doubt that new kinds of animals and plants are
constantly in process of making; that the laws
of change are constantly at work, adapting creatures
to their surroundings or crushing them
out of existence because they will not learn new
ways. And it is probable that these differences
which we mark in the woodpeckers have been
the result of efforts to adapt themselves to a
peculiar kind of life where food was abundant;
and also that by acquired habits and by acquired
tastes for different kinds of foods they will be
subject to still further variations in the future.[110]

XVI

THE ARGUMENT FROM DESIGN

But if the birds are making themselves into
new species, where is the place for God in the
universe? Did not God make all kinds of creatures
in the beginning? How can they go on
being made without God?

These are questions every one ought to ask,
but—did God leave his world after He had
made it and go a long way off? Did He wind
it up like a watch to go till it should run down?
Is the world a machine, or is it alive?

Long ago the wise and good man Socrates
argued that if you did not know there was a
God at all, you could at least infer it because
everything was so wonderfully made. “There
is our body,” said he: “every part of it so perfect
and so reasonable. Consider how the eyes
not only please us with agreeable sensations but
are protected in every way. The eyebrows stand
like a thicket to keep the perspiration from them,
the lids are a curtain to shut out too great light,
the lashes screen them from dust,—everything[111]
is planned for some wise and reasonable end.
And where the evidence of design is so convincing
must we not believe that there was a Designer?”
Words like these he spoke, and we
know because everything is so perfectly contrived
that there must have been a contriver,
who knew all from the beginning. We are compelled
to believe that there is a God.

Shall we believe it less because we find in the
creatures about us intelligence and the power to
care for their own lives? Has God gone on a
visit because these living creatures are looking
out for themselves? Were they made less perfectly
in the beginning because when new conditions
surround them they are able to change
to meet the strange requirements? This is not
less evidence of a Designer, but more. It was
long said that the existence of a watch was
proof of a watchmaker who had planned and
put together all the parts so that they worked
harmoniously. But if the watch had the power
to grow small to fit a small pocket, or large to
fit a large one, to become luminous by night,
and to correct its own time by the sun instead
of being regulated by outside interference, what
should we have said—that it was proof there
was no watchmaker? or that it showed a far
more skillful one, since he could make a living,
self-regulating, adaptive watch?[112]

And so of the world and the creatures in it.
Every evidence we get that they can care for
themselves, that they can adapt themselves to
new conditions, that they are intelligent and
reasonable, capable of improvement in habits or
in structure, is so much surer proof that a wise
God made them what they are. Evolution—for
that is the name by which we call these
changes—does not take God out of the universe
but makes the need of Him stronger.
The argument from design is immensely
strengthened when we consider that we have
not only an obedient machine acting according
to a few fundamental rules, but one that is intelligent
also and capable of self-modification.[113]

APPENDIX

Explanation of Terms.

Head of a Flicker.

[114]

A. Key to the Woodpeckers of North America.

Family characteristics: color always striking, usually in spots,
bars, or patches of contrasting colors, especially black and white.
Sexes usually unlike; male always with some portion of red or
yellow about head, throat, or neck. Tails stiff, rounded, composed
of ten fully developed pointed feathers (and two undeveloped
feathers). Wings large, rounded, with long, conspicuous
secondaries, and short coverts. Bill straight, stout, of medium[115]
length. Toes four, arranged in pairs, except in the three-toed
genus. Iris brown, except when noted. Marked by a habit of
clinging to upright surfaces and digging a deep hole in a tree-trunk
for nesting. Eggs always pearly white.

I. Very large—18 inches or more; conspicuously crested. A.

II. Medium or small—14 inches or less; never crested. B.

A. a¹ Bill gleaming ivory white; fourth toe decidedly longest.

Ivory-billed Woodpecker. 1.

a² Bill blackish; fourth toe not decidedly longest.

Pileated Woodpecker or Logcock. 14.

B. a¹ Toes three; with yellow crown.

Three-toed Woodpeckers. 9 & 10.

a² Toes four; crown never yellow (b).

b¹ Not spotted nor streaked either above or below (c).

c¹ Body clear black; head white.

White-headed Woodpecker. 8.

c² Blue-black above; rump white; head and neck red.

Red-headed Woodpecker. 15.

c³ Greenish black above, with pinkish red belly.

Lewis’s Woodpecker. 17.

c⁴ Greenish black with sulphur yellow forehead and throat.

Californian Woodpecker. 16.

c⁵ Glossy blue-black with scarlet throat and yellow belly.

Male of Williamson’s Sapsucker. 13.

b² Spotted with black or brown on breast and sides, but not
streaked nor barred with white (d).

d¹ Brown spots on breast and sides; upper parts plain brown.

Arizona Woodpecker. 7.

d² Black spots on breast and sides; wings and tail brilliantly colored beneath (e).

e¹ Wings and tail golden beneath; mustaches black in male, wanting in female.

Flicker. 21.

e² Wings and tail golden beneath; mustaches red in both sexes.

Gilded Flicker. 23.
[116]

e³ Wings and tail golden red beneath; mustaches red.

Red-shafted Flicker. 22.

e⁴ Wings and tail golden red beneath; mustaches red; crown brown.

Guadalupe Flicker. 24.

b³ Streaked, spotted, or barred with white on back and wings (f).

f¹ Back streaked, plain, or varied, never barred with white; wings spotted with white (g).

g¹ Clear white and black; white streak down the back (h).

h¹ Medium size, 9-11 inches.

Hairy Woodpecker. 2.

h² Small size, 6-7 inches.

Downy Woodpecker. 3.

g² Grayish white and black; sides closely barred (i).

i¹ Back plain black, white stripe down side of throat.

Female of Arctic Three-toed Woodpecker. 9.

i² Back with interrupted white stripe, white line down side of throat.

Female of American Three-toed Woodpecker. 10.

(Note.—The males are similar with the addition
of the yellow crown. The three toes cannot ordinarily be seen in life.)

g³ Yellowish (often dingy or smutty), white and black;
under parts yellowish; back varied with white, no
line nor streak; rump white; white wing-bars (j).

j¹ Breast with black patch; head of adult with red patches.

Yellow-bellied Sapsucker. 11.

j² Breast and head red.

Red-breasted Sapsucker. 12.

f² Back barred with white; wings spotted or barred with white (k).

k¹ Belly white; ear coverts white.

Red-cockaded Woodpecker. 4.

k² Belly white; forehead black.

Nuttall’s Woodpecker. 6.

k³ Belly smoky brown; forehead and breast same.

Texan Woodpecker. 5.
[117]

k⁴ Belly sulphur or lemon yellow.

Female of Williamson’s Woodpecker. 13.

k⁵ Belly pinkish red.

Red-bellied Woodpecker. 18.

k⁶ Belly yellow, hind neck and forehead orange.

Golden-fronted Woodpecker. 19.

k⁷ Belly yellow, hind neck brown.

Gila Woodpecker. 20.

B. Descriptions of the Woodpeckers of North
America.

The following are descriptions of all the species of Woodpeckers
found in North America, arranged in their proper
genera and in the order given in the check list of the American
Ornithologists’ Union, 1895; with the range of species and subspecies
as defined by the same authority or by Bendire’s “Life
Histories of North American Birds.”

1. Campephilus principalis, Ivory-billed Woodpecker.

Glossy black except white secondaries (very conspicuous)
and white stripe from beneath ear down neck and shoulders;
white nasal tufts; bill white. Both sexes crested;
with scarlet occipital crest, with crest black. Iris yellow.
20 inches.

Cypress swamps of Gulf States, locally distributed.

The largest, shyest, and rarest of our woodpeckers.

2. Dryobates villosus, Hairy Woodpecker.

Black and white. Upper parts glossy black with a broad
white stripe down the back; wings thickly spotted with
white; under parts white; three outer pairs of tail feathers
white; two white and two black stripes on sides of head;
nasal tufts brownish white. with scarlet occipital patch.
9-10 inches.

Eastern United States except South Atlantic and Gulf
States, with the following subspecies, all the races being
resident the year round, and breeding in most places
where they are found:—
[118]

a. D. v. leucomelas, Northern Hairy Woodpecker. 10-11 inches.

Larger, whiter.

British America.

b. D. v. audubonii, Southern Hairy Woodpecker. 8-8.5 inches.

Smaller, more dingy white.

South Atlantic and Gulf States.

c. D. v. harrisii, Harris’s Woodpecker. 9-10 inches.

Upper parts with less white, few wing spots, under parts
soiled white or smoky brown; larger than next.

Northwest coast, northern California to Alaska.

d. D. v. hyloscopus, Cabanis’s Woodpecker. 8.5-9.5 inches.

White stripe down back very wide; purer white below than
harrisii; fewer wing spots than leucomelas and villosus.

Western United States, except northwest coast, east to
the Rocky Mountains.

e. D. v. monticola, Rocky Mountain Woodpecker. 10-11 inches.

Larger; more white spots near bend of wing and secondaries
than hyloscopus, fewer than villosus; pure white below.

Rocky Mountains west to Uintah Mountains, Utah.

3. Dryobates pubescens, Southern Downy Woodpecker.

Black and white; broad white stripe down back; wings
thickly spotted with white; under parts white. with
scarlet occipital patch. A miniature Hairy Woodpecker,
differing only in having four outer pairs of tail feathers
more or less white and the outermost barred. 6.5 inches.
Like the Hairy Woodpecker, the Downy and its subspecies
are resident and breed wherever they occur.

South Atlantic and Gulf States.

a. D. p. gairdnerii, Gairdner’s Woodpecker. 6.75 inches.

Bears same relation to Downy that Harris’s does to Hairy
Woodpecker; under parts smoky white; wings spots few.

Pacific coast north to about lat. 55°.

b. D. p. oreoecus, Batchelder’s Woodpecker. 7.5 inches.

Under parts pure white; under tail coverts unspotted;
fewer wing spots than medianus and pubescens.

Rocky Mountain region of United States.

c. D. p. medianus, Downy Woodpecker. 7 inches.
[119]

The larger, whiter form seen in New England and the
Northern States.

d. D. p. nelsoni, Nelson’s Downy Woodpecker.

Whiter, larger, with fewer black bars on outer tail
feathers.

Alaska and region north of 55°.

4. Dryobates borealis, Red-cockaded Woodpecker.

Upper parts black barred with white, under parts dingy white;
sides streaked and spotted with black; wings spotted with
white; outer tail feathers barred; nasal tufts and large ear
patch white; stripe of black down side of neck. with
a tiny tuft of scarlet feathers on each side of head. 7.5-8.5
inches.

Pine woods of southeastern United States, from Tennessee
southwest to eastern Texas and the Indian Territory;
casual north to Pennsylvania.

5. Dryobates scalaris bairdi, Texan Woodpecker, Ladder-backed Woodpecker.

Upper parts barred with black and white on back, wings,
and outer tail feathers; sides of head striped; forehead,
nasal feathers, and under parts smoky gray, brownest on
belly; crown speckled with white or red; with nape crimson.
7-7.5 inches.

Southern border of United States, Texas to California,
north to southwestern Utah and southern Nevada; generally
resident.

a. D. s. lucasanus, St. Lucas Woodpecker. Larger.

Lower California, north to 34° in Colorado desert.

These are both subspecies of a Mexican species not occurring
within our limits.

6. Dryobates nuttallii, Nuttall’s Woodpecker.

Upper parts barred with black and white; under parts and
outer tail feathers white or dingy white; nasal tufts white;
forehead and crown black sprinkled with white. with red
[120]
on occiput and nape. 7-7.5 inches.

Southern Oregon and California west of Sierra Nevada
and Cascade Ranges; most common in the oak belt of
the foothills.

Easily distinguished from Downy Woodpecker by being
barred on the back, instead of striped.

7. Dryobates arizonæ, Arizona Woodpecker.

Upper parts plain brown, not spotted nor streaked; primaries
dotted with fine white dots; outer tail feathers barred;
under parts white, thickly spotted (except throat), with large,
round, brown spots. with red occipital band. 7.5-8.5
inches.

Southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico; among
oaks of the foothills from 4000 to 7000 feet elevation.

8. Xenopicus albolarvatus, White-headed Woodpecker.

Glossy black all over, except showy white patch on primaries,
and head and throat pure white (forehead and crown
sometimes grayish). with broad occipital band of scarlet.
9 inches. “Iris pinkish red” (Bendire).

Mountains of Pacific coast, east to western Nevada and
western Idaho, usually in the pine and fir forests above
4000 feet altitude.

9. Picoides arcticus, Arctic Three-toed Woodpecker.

Glossy black above, unmarked except by fine white spots on
primaries; under parts grayish white, sides thickly barred
black and white; three outer pairs of tail feathers white,
sides of throat with broad white stripe. with large crown
patch of deep yellow. 9.5 inches.

British America, south into the northern tier of States
and into the Sierra Nevada Mountains to Lake Tahoe.

Most commonly seen in the track of forest fires, where it
is usually abundant for about two years; rare outside of the
extensive soft wood tracts, and usually found singly or in
pairs except when on burnt land. I have found this species
far more common than the next, and the best mark in life
to be the white stripe on the neck, in distinction from the
[121]
white line of P. americanus.

10. Picoides americanus, American Three-toed Woodpecker.

Very similar to preceding species, but with narrow bars of
white forming an interrupted stripe down the back; head
thickly sprinkled with white in both sexes and a white line
on nape or just below; a white line, too narrow to be called
a stripe, down side of throat. with crown bright yellow.
9 inches. Same range in the East as last; replaced in West
by following subspecies:—

a. P. a. alascensis, Alaskan Three-toed Woodpecker.

Smaller; more white; nape very white; more white on top
of head.

Alaska, south to 48°. (Mt. Baker, Washington).

b. P. a. dorsalis, Alpine Three-toed Woodpecker.

More white on back and head than P. americanus, less than
alascensis; but continuous, not barred. “Iris dark cherry-red”
(Mearns).

Rocky Mountain region, south to New Mexico and Arizona.

11. Sphyrapicus varius, Yellow-bellied Sapsucker.

Under parts whitish or pale sulphur yellow; upper parts
black, mottled with pure or yellowish white; rump white;
wings spotted, and with conspicuous white coverts; tail
black with outer webs of outer feathers and inner webs of middle
feathers light colored; sides streaked; breast with a broad
black patch extending in a “chin-strap” to the corners of
the mouth; sides of the head striped. Occiput black, nape
white. with forehead, crown, chin, and throat crimson;
usually with crown crimson, forehead black, and throat
white, back more brownish; sometimes, and young always,
with crown blackish. 7.5-8.5 inches.

Colors vary much with age, sex, and season; the wing bar
and yellowish tinge are good marks for all plumages; the
rump and breast patch for adult birds.

Eastern North America, breeding from Massachusetts
northward, migrating in winter to the Southern States.

a. S. v. nuchalis, Red-naped Sapsucker.

Similar, but an additional red stripe on nape, and the black
[122]
chin-strap replaced by crimson. 8-8.5 inches.

Rocky Mountains to Coast Range, replacing the above in
the mountains; usually breeding at from 5000 to 10,000
feet elevation.

12. Sphyrapicus ruber, Red-breasted Sapsucker.

Body and under parts similar to S. varius, but back much
less variegated with white. No black on breast, no white
stripe through eyes. Nasal tufts brownish instead of white.
Head, neck, and breast uniform crimson. Sexes alike. Young
with crimson replaced by gray or “claret brown” (Bendire).
8.5-9 inches.

Pacific coast, Sierra Nevada, and on both sides of Cascade
Mountains; a summer resident only north of northern
California.

At first sight the Red-breasted Sapsucker might be mistaken
for the Red-headed Woodpecker, but the two birds
do not inhabit the same country.

13. Sphyrapicus thyroideus, Williamson’s Sapsucker.

Sexes totally dissimilar except in having a white rump and
yellow under parts. Male, glossy black all over except conspicuous
white rump and white wing coverts, two white stripes
on sides of head, white nasal tufts, white spots on primaries;
sides and tail coverts mottled; a stripe of scarlet down middle
of throat and brilliant yellow under parts. Female, light
brown; head clear brown; body, wings, and tail closely
barred with black and white; no white wing coverts; rarely
a red throat like male; usually but not always a large
black patch on breast, and always a yellow belly and white
rump. Young males lack the red on the throat and usually
the yellow on the belly; the black is dull, and the throat a
dingy white. Young females lack the yellow on the belly
and the black on breast, and are dull-colored and indistinctly
marked. 9-9.5 inches.

Rocky Mountain region, west to Sierra Nevada, Cascades
and northern Coast Ranges, breeding at from 5000
[123]
to 9000 feet elevation. The handsomest of our woodpeckers.

14. Ceophloeus pileatus, Pileated Woodpecker, Logcock.

Body blackish slate; wings with a large white patch conspicuous
only when flying; throat white; a white stripe
across cheek and down neck; jaw-stripe scarlet in male,
blackish in female; both sexes with scarlet crest, but in the
male the whole top of head (which is slaty black in female)
equally brilliant. This red cap gives the bird the name of
pileated. Iris yellow. 17 inches.

Wooded regions of Southern States, Florida to North
Carolina, very rarely near settlements, but far more common
than the following subspecies of the North and
West.

a. C. p. abieticola, Northern Pileated Woodpecker.

Larger; more extensive white markings; the black grayer
or browner.

From Virginia northward to 63° in the East, and in the
West among the Rocky Mountains, north of Colorado, to
the northwest coast; a shy woodland bird to be looked
for only in the primitive evergreen forests, though sometimes
occurring in any heavy timber and, in New England,
upon the higher well-wooded mountains. The
largest of the northern woodpeckers; resident.

15. Melanerpes erythrocephalus, Red-headed Woodpecker.

Wings, tail, and upper parts glossy blue-black; rump, exposed
secondaries, and under parts from breast downward
pure white; head, neck, and breast crimson. Sexes alike.
Young with red and black wholly or partly replaced by
grayish brown; can be recognized by white markings. 9.5
inches.

United States, west to Rocky Mountains; rare east of
Hudson River, but ordinarily breeding wherever found;
in winter usually migratory from its northern limits, the
migration depending principally upon the food supply
and depth of snow.

16. Melanerpes formicivorus, Ant-eating Woodpecker.

Upper parts, wings, and tail glossy greenish black; rump
[124]
and lower parts white; white patch on primaries, conspicuous
in flight; upper throat and line about the bill dull
black; forehead with wide white band; lower throat sulphur
yellow; breast and sides thickly streaked with black and
white. with crown and occiput crimson; with crown
black, occiput crimson. Iris white. 7-9 inches.

Mexico; western Texas.

a. M. f. angustifrons, Narrow-fronted Woodpecker.

Similar, but with a narrow band of white across the forehead;
breast and sides not so thickly streaked.

Lower California, never occurring within the borders of
the United States.

b. M. f. bairdi, Californian Woodpecker, El Carpintero.

Similar to M. formicivorus, but the breast black, little
streaked with white except along the sides; yellow of throat
paler, or replaced by white. Iris white. Larger, 7.5-9.5
inches.

Pacific coast, north into Oregon to 44°, east to southern
New Mexico and Texas in the south and to the eastern
slopes of the Sierra Nevada and Cascade Mountains in
the north, but more abundant, on the western than on the
eastern slopes of these mountains.

17. Melanerpes torquatus, Lewis’s Woodpecker.

Upper parts, wings, and tail glossy greenish black; under
parts pinkish red; chest and collar round hind neck hoary
gray; crown and sides of head black; forehead, cheeks, and
chin crimson. Sexes alike. Young with pink replaced by
grayish. 10.5-11.5 inches.

Pacific coast, east to Black Hills and Rocky Mountains
between Arizona and 49th parallel; casual still farther
east; migratory in its northern ranges; a silent, heavy
flying bird, different in habits and appearance from the
other woodpeckers; often seen flycatching.

18. Melanerpes carolinus, Red-bellied Woodpecker, Zebra Bird.

Back and wings black, barred with white; under and upper
[125]
tail coverts, middle and outer tail feathers, white varied
with black; head and under parts ashy; belly tinged with reddish.
with whole top of head and nape bright red;
with forehead and nape red, crown gray. 9-10 inches.

Eastern and Southern States between the Hudson River
and the Rocky Mountains, north to southern New York,
Ohio, southern Michigan, etc.; migratory in its northern
ranges.

19. Melanerpes aurifrons, Golden-fronted Woodpecker.

Back and wings barred with black and white; rump white;
entire under parts brownish white, unspotted (except under
tail coverts); primaries unspotted, except at tip; tail black
with slightly barred outer feathers; belly yellowish; forehead
and hind neck orange in both sexes. with crown red set in
a larger patch of clear gray; with crown clear gray. 9.5
inches.

Central and southern Texas, north to about 33º; breeds
wherever found.

20. Melanerpes uropygialis, Gila Woodpecker.

Back and wings barred with black and white; head and
lower parts smoky brown; rump black and white; tail barred
on inner and outer feathers; primaries unspotted; belly yellow
(not conspicuous). with red crown surrounded by
brownish; “iris red” (Hayden). 9 inches.

Southwestern New Mexico and Arizona to southeastern
California, usually above 2000 feet altitude; its distribution
depending principally upon the giant cactus.

21. Colaptes auratus, Flicker, Yellow-hammer, High-hole, Clape.

Back and wings (except primaries) brownish gray, barred
with black; under parts pale vinaceous spotted with black
spots from breast downward; rump white; tail and wings
golden yellow beneath, dark above, showing the yellow shafts;
tail feathers with black tips below; top of head ashy gray,
sides of head and throat vinaceous; a broad black crescent
[126]
across breast, a bright scarlet one on nape. with black
jaw patches; without them. 12 inches.

South Atlantic and Gulf region, north to North Carolina.

a. C. a. luteus, Northern Flicker.

Larger; paler; black bars above narrower; less black and
white below.

North from North Carolina and west to the Rocky Mountains;
casual farther west; migratory from its northern
ranges.

22. Colaptes cafer, Red-shafted Flicker.

Color pattern similar to above with the following differences:
wings and tail red beneath instead of yellow; throat
ashy gray; usually no red on occiput (though some specimens
show a narrow crescent). with red jaw patches. 12.5-14
inches.

Rocky Mountain region west to Pacific coast from
Mexico to British Columbia, except northwest coast
region of Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia,
and occasionally east to Kansas and Nebraska; resident
except in the more northern portions of its range.

a. C. c. saturatior, Northwestern Flicker.

Darker; smaller; narrower breast crescent.

Northwest coast, replacing the above, from which it cannot
be separated in life.

23. Colaptes chrysoides, Gilded Flicker; Cactus Flicker.

Color pattern same as C. auratus, but throat gray; top of
head brown; occiput without band; tail band broader and
yellow paler than in C. auratus. with jaw patches bright
red; “iris blood red” (Hayden).

Central and southern Arizona and Lower California.

a. C. c. brunescens, Brown Flicker.

A curious subspecies of the last, smaller, with larger,
more numerous spots and a smoky brown cast of plumage;
black tail band very wide; jaw patches red; wings and tail
yellow beneath.

Lower (not southern) California; casual only in southern
California; in Arizona to 35°.
[127]

24. Colaptes rufipileus, Guadalupe Island Flicker.

Coloration like C. cafer, crown decidedly brown; crescent
on nape wanting; jaw patches red; wings and tail red beneath.

Guadalupe Island off the coast of Lower California.

[129]

INDEX

Aard-vark, 104.



Acorns, eaten by woodpeckers, 46, 51, 57, 58, 59.



Acquired habits, 61-66.



Adaptations of woodpeckers to environment,104-109.



Ant-bear, 104, 106.



Ants, as food for woodpeckers, 3, 30, 63, 105, 106.



Argument from design, 110.





Bear, black, 107.



Beechnuts, as food for woodpeckers, 57, 58, 59.



Beetles, as food for woodpeckers, 3, 11, 63.



Bill of woodpeckers as a tool, 68-76.



Borers, 3, 10, 11, 29, 30, 36.



Burroughs, John, quoted, 17.





Cacti, woodpeckers nesting in, 20.



Cannibalism among woodpeckers, 64.



Carpenter, the. See California woodpecker.



Carpintero, El. See California woodpecker.



Caterpillars, as food for woodpeckers, 10, 11, 29, 63.



Cecropia chrysalids, eaten by woodpeckers, 9.



Chestnuts, eaten by woodpeckers, 59.



Chickadee, 16, 21, 25, 30, 32, 74.



Chipmunks, hoarding food, 60.



Clape. See Flicker.



Creeper, brown, 5, 81, 87, 88.



Crossbills, eating salted food, 31.



Crow, hoarding habit, 60; 74.



Cuckoo, ground, 82.



Cuckoos, yoke-toed, 5, 82.





Drumming of yellow-bellied sapsucker, 16, 17.





Evolution, 109, 112.





Feeding young, how the flicker does it, 24, 25.



Fence-posts used by woodpeckers, 48, 56, 58.



Finch, purple, 39.



Finches, 74.



Fish-spears, 12, 13.



Flicker, 6, 7, 15, 18, 20, 23-26, 73, 74, 82, 88, 89, 95, 97-99, 101, 103, 106, 125.

brown, 126.

cactus, 126.

gilded, 126.

Guadalupe Island, 127.

northern, 126.

northwestern, 126.

red-shafted, 126.



Flycatching habits of woodpeckers, 7, 56, 106, 124.



Foot, of a four-toed woodpecker figured, 77.

of a three-toed woodpecker figured, 80.

discussed as a tool, 77-85.





Grasshoppers, as food for woodpeckers, 3, 56, 63.



Grosbeaks, pine, 39.



Grouse, ruffed, 14, 15.



Grouse, sharp-tailed, 15.





Hawk, sparrow, 21.



High-hole. See Flicker.



Hoarding habits, 62, 63.



Hummingbird, Anna’s, 27.



[130]
Hummingbirds, 25, 103.



Hyoid bones, 100-103.





Jay, blue, hoarding habit, 53, 60.





Kinglets, 5.





Lightning rods attracting woodpeckers, 18.



Logcock. See Woodpecker, pileated.





Maple, rock and red, sugar made from, 36.



Maize, eaten by English sparrows, 62, 65.



Mandibles of woodpeckers, 13, 101.



Martin, sand, 20.



Mice, hoarding habit, 60.



Migration, dependent upon food supply, 63.



Mountain-ash trees, sought by woodpeckers, 38.





Nesting of woodpeckers, 20-23.



Nests, in unusual places, 20.



North America, ornithologically defined, 114.



Nuthatches, 5, 21, 30, 81.





Oaks, used by Californian woodpecker for storing nuts, 48, 49.



Oranges, eaten by woodpeckers, 65, 66.



Owls, 15, 21, 80.





Pangolin, as an ant-eater, 104.



Parrot, 13, 82.



Parroquet, Carolina, 5.



Pigeon, domestic, 27.



Pines, acorns stored in, 49.



“Ploughshare,” anchylosed vertebræ of tail, 86.





Ravens, 74.



Reason in woodpeckers’ hoarding, 62.



Red-head. See Woodpecker, red-headed.



Robins, 39.





Sap, not used as an insect-lure, 41.

how its loss harms the tree, 44, 45.



Sapsucker, orange, 65. See, also, Woodpecker, red-bellied.

red-breasted, 122.

red-naped, 121.

Williamson’s, 122.

yellow-bellied, 7, 15-17, 33-45, 59, 102, 103, 105, 106.



Skull of woodpecker figured, 101.



Sparrow, English or house, 21, 62, 65.



Spears, 12, 13.



Spruce, acorns stored in, 47, 49, 53.



Squirrels, thievishness of, 23, 53.



Subspecies defined, 114.



Swallow, eaves or cliff, 61, 64, 65.



Swallow, tree, 21.



Swift, chimney, 5, 20, 61, 87, 88.





Tail, shape, 89.

number of rectrices, 95.

experimental demonstration of shape a priori, 91.

reason for shape, 98.



Tail-feathers studied, 94-97.



Taste in the woodpeckers, 38, 39.



Telegraph poles resorted to by woodpeckers, 7, 18, 48.



Thumb, of birds, 80.



Tin roofs resorted to by woodpeckers, 17, 55.



Titmouse, crested, 21.



Toes, numbering of, 79, 80.



Tongue, appearance of, 99.

figured, 99.

bones of, 13, 100-103.



Trogons, yoke-toed, 82.





Vanessa butterfly, 16.



Vegetable food of woodpeckers, 3, 31.



Vireos, 30.





Warblers, 30.



Weevils, not the object in storing nuts, 52.



Woodpecker, Alaskan three-toed, 121.

alpine three-toed, 121.

American three-toed, 121.

ant-eating, 123.

arctic three-toed, 120.

Arizona, 120.

Batchelder’s, 118.

[131]
Batchelder’s, 118.

black-breasted, 6. See, also, Williamson’s sapsucker.

Cabanis’s, 118.

Californian, 46-54, 56, 66.

downy, 6, 17, 21, 28-33, 59, 63, 70, 74, 83, 86, 88, 95, 107, 114, 118.

Gairdner’s, 118.

Gila, 55, 125.

golden-fronted, 55, 102, 125.

hairy, 6, 9, 28, 32, 59, 63, 74, 83, 86, 88, 89, 95, 97-99, 107, 114, 117.

Harris’s, 118.

ivory-billed, 70, 71, 73, 83, 88, 89, 93, 97, 98, 107, 117.

ladder-backed, 119.

Lewis’s, 6, 13, 55, 59, 66, 103, 124.

narrow-fronted, 124.

Nelson’s downy, 119.

northern hairy, 118.

northern pileated, 123.

Nuttall’s, 119.

pileated, 6, 71, 73, 83, 88, 93, 95, 98, 99, 107, 123.

red-bellied, 6, 55, 65, 124.

red-cockaded, 119.

red-headed, 6, 7, 11, 55-58, 60-64, 105, 123.

Rocky Mountain, 118.

St. Lucas, 119.

southern downy, 118.

southern hairy, 118.

Texan, 119.

three-toed, foot figured, 80.

white-headed, 120.



Woodpeckers, advantages of, as subject for study, 2.

bill as a tool, 69-73.

carpenters or miners, 68.

character of, 7, 8.

coloration of, 5.

coloration of sexes, 6.

covered nostrils, 74, 75.

favorite haunts, 3, 7.

foot, structure and uses, 77.

habit of drumming, 17.

how to recognize the woodpeckers, 4.

inferences from study of bills, 75.

hunting borers, 10, 11.

nesting, 21, 22.

preferred foods, 3, 7.

tail, study of, 86-99.

winter quarters, 22.

wooing, 15.





Yoke-toed feet, 82.





Zebra bird. See Woodpecker, red-bellied.

[132]

Transcribers Notes

• Various punctuation and other printing errors corrected


• Inconsistent hyphenation of words regularised


• Spelling of reëcho (page 16) left intact


• Male symbol shown as Female symbol shown as


• Illustrations have been moved to not break paragraphs, this means
  that the Illustration Index will not always give the exact location of pictures