182 BULLETIN 17 4, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



curred in correspondence with precisely sucli a fluctuation in its 

 essential, wintertime food supply : it must find, when the ground is 

 snow-covered, ant-infested trunks of large trees. 



In September I once made leisurely observation upon a bird at 

 work upon a dead but standing hemlock tree. With swinging, ob- 

 liquely directed blows it was splitting off the outer leaves of the 

 scalelike bark and pausing intermittently with head turned to the 

 trunk, licking up, as I supposed, the insect life thus exposed. Again, 

 in September, I came upon a pair feeding together upon the ground. 

 They had been tearing up a carpet of moss that spread over damp 

 surfaces both of wood and of rock, and I thought that their prey 

 must be insect life that they were finding in the moss itself. 



And yet again, on September 21, I watched for many minutes an 

 adult female feeding on a charred and decayed stump that remained 

 in a young forest of jack pines. She w^as perched about a foot from 

 the ground. Her method was by deliberate and swinging blows to 

 break away platelike fragments of still firm wood, and then to intrude 

 her bill and search with her tongue (as was evident) the opened 

 cavity. This licking was always, or nearly always, upward, and 

 often the head was turned, crown inward, throat outward. A jay 

 might call or some other forest sound be heard, and the bird would 

 pause, listen for an instant, and then resume her work. A day or 

 two later I visited the stump and with my knife made an incision in 

 it, and I found it to be the home of a colony of ants — not of the 

 large Camponotus but of a smaller, wine-black species about a quarter 

 of an inch long. The body of the stum]) was honeycombed with their 

 galleries. 



Of the major wintertime operations Vickers (1910) has written: 



Like the flicker, the [pileated woodpecker] is a great lover of ants, which 

 accordingly occupy a large place in his bill-of-fare. So, to dine on the big 

 black timber ants, which are his special delight, he drives holes to the very 

 heart of growing forest trees, tapping the central chamber of the colony, 

 where, in winter, he finds the dormant swarm unable to move and feasts upon 

 them at leisure . . . And the Log-cock makes no mistakes, though man 

 might find no outward sign of an ant-tree. Doubtless that strong formic 

 smell, coupled with his experience in sounding tree trunks, — as a man tells 

 a ripe watermelon by the plunk of it, — enables him not only to find the tree, 

 but, what is more remarkable, to drive his hole with such precision that he 

 taps the heart of the community. 



O. M. Bryens (1926) wrote from St. Joseph County, Mich.: 



On February 16, 1925, I was able to approach within twelve feet of one of 

 these Woodpeckers busily engaged in digging in a maple stub, two feet in 

 diameter and about twelve feet high. He was after insects whose borings I 

 found later upon examining the wood. I watched him for about an hour. 



He seldom gave more than three or four pecks at a time, and would then 

 swing his head round to one side or the other, sometimes raising his scarlet 

 crest. He seldom threw back his head without tossing a chip back of him. 



