AMERICAN THREE-TOED WOODPECKER 117 



spruces, balsams and arbor vitaes, intermingled with a few deciduous 

 trees, comes quite to the water's edge and here, on June 2d, 1897, 

 I found my first nest of the Banded Three-toed Woodpecker." 



In the same county, Charles L. Whittle (1920) found what he 

 called a colony of three-toed woodpeckers in "a single small area of 

 virgin forest containing abundant white spruces and balsams, the 

 former splendid, healthy trees of large size, and the latter also large 

 but having many trees diseased or decayed at the heart. * * * 

 In the area of diseased balsams, a pleasant surprise awaited me, for 

 here Three-toed Woodpeckers of both species, sexes, and all recog- 

 nizable ages, were distinctly common — a colony, so to speak, tem- 

 porarily concentrated owing to two factors: (1) The nearly complete 

 destruction in this region of the former virgin forest of large coni- 

 fers on which and in which they fed and nested ; and (2) the presence 

 of abundant food at this locality in the diseased balsam trees." 



Elon H. Eaton (1914) says: 



In New York it is evidently confined to the Adirondack forests. I liave heard 

 of no specimen taken farther from the spruce belt than Waterville, Oneida 

 county. It therefore shares with the Spruce grouse, the Canada jay and the 

 Hudsonian chickadee the distinction of being one of our perfectly nonmigratory 

 species. Within the spruce and balsam forests it is quite uniformly dis- 

 tributed, but is less common than the Black-backed woodpecker, evidently about 

 one-half as common as that species. It inhabits both the spruce swamps 

 and the mountain sides. While making the bird survey of the Mount Marcy 

 district we found this species breeding on the slopes of Marcy just above 

 Skylight camp, an altitude of 4,000 feet, and in the swamp at the Upper 

 Ausable lake at an altitude of 2,000 feet. 



Nesting. — Mr. Brewster (1898) describes, in considerable detail, 

 the nest he found in a spruce tree in Coos County, N. H., as follows : 



On measuring the spruce I found it to be thirty-nine inches in circumference 

 one foot above the ground, and twenty-nine inches at the nest. The hole was 

 on the west side at a height above the ground of exactly ten feet and eleven 

 inches. The entrance hole was somewhat irregular outwardly measuring about 

 one and three quarters inches in breadth by two inches in height — the greater 

 diameter vertically being due to the fact that the lower edges had been chiselled 

 away rather freely to afford a foothold for the bird ; half an inch in, the hole 

 was perfectly round, and measured one and one-half inches in diameter. 



The interior or nest cavity was irregularly gourd-shaped and ten and one- 

 eighth inches in depth, its greatest diameter, about four and one-half inches, 

 being midway between the bottom and top. The walls were rough and seamy 

 but this was not, perhaps, the fault of the birds, for the wood, although soft 

 and easily worked, had evidently peeled off in long, stringy fibers. 



The eggs lay on a deep mat of these shreds some of which were more than 

 one inch in length. 



Dr. C. Hart Merriam informed Major Bendire (1895) that "numer- 

 ous nests were found in the Adirondacks in June, 1883. Most of 

 them were in the flooded timber bordering the inlet of Seventh Lake, 

 Fulton Chain. They varied from 5 to 12 feet in height above the 



