42 BULLETIN 17 4, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



coniferous trees, either living or dead ones, but nesting excavations 

 were many of them in trunks of deciduous trees." 



Bendire (1895) says that, at Fort Klamath, Oreg., "it appears to be 

 especially abundant in tracts in which the timber has been killed by 

 fire, and where many of the slowly rotting trunks still remain stand- 

 ing. Such burnings are frequently met with in the mountains, and 

 seem to attract several species of Woodpeckers, presumably on account 

 of the abundance of suitable food to be found." 



Courtship.— GriimeW and Storer (1924) say: "At Chinquapin, on 

 May 19, 1919, a pair of these woodpeckers was seen going through 

 their courting antics. A male was in a large yellow pine at the 

 edge of a logged-over area, calling almost incessantly. His usual 

 speenh had become spenk-tej'-ter-ter, a staccato run repeated every 

 few seconds. The female answered in like voice but uttered the trill 

 less often. The male changed his location many times, and after 

 protracted calling on his part, the female flew to the same tree." 



Nesting.— Bendive (1895) writes: 



I took my first nest uear Camp Harney, Oregon, on May 29, 1875, in a 

 canyon on the southern slopes of the Blue Mountains, at an altitude of about 

 5,000 feet. The cavity was excavated in the main trunk of a nearly dead 

 aspen, about 12 feet from the ground. The entrance hole was about 1% inches 

 in diameter, and the cavity about 9 inches deep. It contained four much 

 incubated eggs. The female was in the hole, and stayed there looking out until 

 I had struck the tree several times with a hatchet, when she flew off and 

 alighted on one of the limbs of the tree, uttering cries of distress, which 

 brought the male, who was still more demonstrative, hopping from limb to 

 limb, squealing and scolding at me and pecking at the limbs on which he 

 perched. At Fort Klamath, Oregon, it was somewhat more common, and here 

 I took several of its nests. * * * Dead or badly decayed trees are preferred 

 to live ones for nesting purposes, and deciduous trees to conifers; it also 

 nests occasionally in firs and madrone trees. 



Milton P. Skinner says, in his notes, that "in the Yosemite Na- 

 tional Park, one nested in a living willow trunk about ten feet above 

 the ground." Grinnell, Dixon, and Linsdale (1930) say that, in the 

 Lassen Peak region, "aspens and cottonwoods, dead at core, seemed 

 to be preferred nesting trees, although other kinds were also used. 

 Nest holes, when in conifers, were made in dead and decaying trunks 

 or stubs." 



Eggs. — Three or four eggs make up the usual set for this wood- 

 pecker. They are indistinguishable from the eggs of other hairy 

 woodpeckers, though Bendire (1895) says that "those of an elliptical 

 ovate shape are more common than the oval and elliptical ovals." 

 The measurements of 15 eggs average 24.70 by 18.80 millimeters ; the 

 eggs showing the four extremes measure 26.4 by 20.6 and 21.5 by 

 16.2 millimeters. 



