58 BULLETIlsT 17 4, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



and the next came up, but not quite so far. He in liis turn subsided 

 and the parent entered to feed the weaker ones still farther 

 down. * * * 



"On June 12 the last of the young left the nest, which upon being 

 measured was found to be 10 inches deep." 



A. Dawes DuBois (MS.) tells of the flight of the young birds from 

 the nest : "The young chattered most of the time during the last two 

 days of nest life. One at a time they looked out a great deal at 

 the strange outer world. They left the nest on Jujie 11. The last 

 two, a male and a female, left during the afternoon, each after being 

 fed at the entrance and seeing the parent fly away. The young male 

 flew from the nest hole straight to a tree 60 feet away. His sister 

 quickly followed, lighting on the trunk of the same tree and follow- 

 ing her parent up the bole in the hitching manner of their kind 

 as though she had been practicing this vertical locomotion all her 

 life." 



Plumages. — [Author's note: Young downy woodpeckers are 

 hatched naked and blind, but the juvenal plumage is acquired before 

 the young leave the nest. In this first plumage, the young male is 

 much like the adult male, except that the red nuchal patch is lacking ; 

 the forehead is black, spotted with white, but the crown and occiput 

 are more or less marked with various shades of red, pinkish, or yellow- 

 ish, as well as spotted with white ; the black portions of the plumage 

 are duller than in the adult ; the sides of the breast are streaked and 

 the flanks obscurely spotted with dusky ; the white areas, underparts, 

 and white spots elsewhere, as well as the rectrices, are tinged with 

 yellowish. 



The young female is like the young male, except that there is no 

 red on the head, and the crown is clear black, or black spotted with 

 white. L. L. Snj^der (1923) has shown that young males sometimes 

 have only white markings on a black crown and that young females 

 sometimes have reddish, pinkish, or j^ellowish markings on the crown. 



The juvenal plumage is worn but a short time, for a complete molt, 

 beginning in September or earlier, produces a first winter plumage, 

 which is practically adult. Adults have a complete annual molt from 

 July to September. Both adults and young show a tinge of yellowish 

 in the white areas in fresh fall plumage, which gradually fades away.] 



Food. — F. E. L. Beal (1911) in an examination of the contents of 

 723 stomachs of the downy woodpecker found that 76.05 percent was 

 animal matter, the remaining 23.95 percent vegetable matter. The 

 following quotations are from his exhaustive report. 



BeetlPs taken collectively amount to 21.55 percent, and are the largest item 

 of the food. Of these, a little less than 14 percent are wood-boring larvae. 

 * * * They were found in 289 stomachs, or about 40 percent of all, and 10 

 contained no other food. This is only about half the amount found in the 



