The California VVoodpecker 



He is a handsome bird, and if there were not so many of his species he 

 would attract a great deal of attention. He has a bright red head, black and 

 white body, and a needle-pointed tail. Ihe tail supports him in a perpendicular 

 position on the side of a tree while he is hammering, or rather, chiseling, a 

 hole in its bark. 



All woodpeckers can drive deep holes into trees or stumps, but the Cali- 

 fornia woodpecker surpasses them all as a hole-digger ; he not only digs the hole 

 l)ut he fills it up with a nut or an acorn. 



While a great many other birds have the hole-digging instinct, there are 

 few of them that possess the hole-filling instinct. The blue jays and the 

 squirrels have a habit of accumulating supplies, and you may see them, almost 

 any day in autumn, snatching the acorns from twigs and branches. The same 

 instinct prompts this woodpecker to lay in his stores of acorns. Some peojjle 

 say that he never resorts to these supplies again, but just lays them up without a 

 thought as to the future. Rut nature does not work blindly, but always with 

 some wise purpose. 



This bird can drill a hole in the very hardest wood, and at this business 

 he is employed almost all the time. The holes are usually made in rows, at 

 regular distances apart, about the size of an acorn. He has been known to 

 surround a giant red-wood tree, over twenty feet in circumference, with rings 

 of holes one above another, from the root to the topmost limb, for over 200 

 feet. I say "he"' did it, but I mean, of course, generation after generation of 

 them, for many, many years. 



After he has got the hole to his liking, he flies oft to the nearest oak tree 

 and secures an acorn, which he brings to the storehouse tree and places in the 

 little "safety deposit" he has made for it. It fits exactly, and so, inserting it 

 sharp end fir^t. he hit^ it repeatedly with his beak and drives it in to stay till 

 needed. 



So long as the woodpecker confines his harvesting to the acorns no one, 

 except the Indians, who frequently store them up for winter food, will have 

 anything to say. But he likes nuts as well, and a story is told of a family of 

 woodpeckers that completely stripped a small grove of almond trees. The 

 owner thought he would have a good crop, and when the time came to gather 

 it, there was not a nut on any tree ! One of the boys found an old oak partly 

 decayed, and riddled with holes from top to bottom. In each hole was an 

 almond ! The tree was cut down, and the man secured several bushels of 

 almonds, but the woodpeckers scolded him loudly. — F. A. Ober, St. Nicholas. 



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