NORTHERN PILEATED WOODPECKER 173 



Roger T. Peterson (MS.) says: "The pileated woodpecker has 

 greatly increased in the Northeast during the past few years. At 

 one time it was nearly gone from many parts of New York State and 

 southern New England, where it had occurred in fair numbers. 

 The bird disappeared from northern New Jersey about 1880, and 

 from southern New Jersey in 1908. About 1920 W. DeWitt Miller 

 found it again at two or three points in northern New Jersey; and 

 now it is fairly common in many places in the northern part of the 

 State, and as far east as in Bergen County, within 15 miles of New 

 York City. Within the past 5 years it has reappeared in the lower 

 Hudson Valley. It is especially common in some portions of south- 

 western New York State. In one recent year I found four nests 

 near the city of Jamestown, N. Y. Similar increases have been noted 

 by bird students in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Ohio, and Mis- 

 souri" — and, he might have added, in Pennsylvania. 



Ludlow Griscom (1929) wrote: "I incline to the view that the 

 increase in this Woodpecker is not so much due to conservation, as 

 to its adaptation to less primeval conditions. The generation that 

 regarded this species as a game-bird died off in this Region [the 

 Northeastern States] before it returned." 



Granted that the species shows itself to be adaptable, it still is 

 pertinent to note other ameliorations of circumstance. Wlien lum- 

 bering operations have been carried through to completion, when the 

 camps are gone from the woods, and when new growth has begun 

 to spring up, it is generally true that animal life in its larger forms 

 tends to reappear and to increase. Again, the development of more 

 fertile lands in the West has had effect in the abandonment of poorer 

 lands in the East. Extensive areas, in New England particularly, 

 that a hundred years ago were farmed, have now long since returned 

 to wilderness. The forests of second growth, as they approach ma- 

 turity, may be supposed increasingly to afford the food resources 

 proper to this denizen of the great forests. And, finally, protective 

 laws have been more intelligently framed, more widely adopted, and 

 more generally respected. 



The birds range over plain and mountain side. They prefer "the 

 edges of the balsam and cedar swamps, when surrounded with forests 

 of hardwood and hemlocks" (Blackwelder, 1909, Iron County, Mich.). 

 Their nesting places are ordinarily in lowlands, and near water. In 

 the region where I have known* them best— the Huron Mountains, 

 in Marquette County, Mich.— I have found the birds to occur in 

 pairs or families at intervals of two or three miles along the course 

 of a river that flows through primeval forest land. This I take to 

 be a fair indication of the saturation point in pileated woodpecker 

 population. 



