202 BULLETIN 174, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



before feeding their young, I went down to reconnoiter. Tlie place looked 

 like a field hospital after a severe engagement. There were wings, and wing- 

 covers, heads and legs strewn around the stump in great profusion. Then I 

 understood it all. The stump was their meat-block, and they were preparing 

 the food for their young by removing the hard and indigestible parts. They 

 dispatched this work with much dexterity, without using their feet to confine 

 the insect; they laid it on the stump, and, with the bill alone, succeeded in 

 removing the undesirable parts. 



The kinds of insects whose remains were found there was a study. They 

 were almost as gaudy as the woodpecker himself. * * * Woodpeckers can 

 undoubtedly distinguish between colors; they find the ruddiest apple and the 

 rosiest peach in the orchard. In like manner, they seem to be attracted by 

 bright-colored insects. They prefer beautiful butterflies, silky moths, and 

 brilliant beetles. The favorite food of this pair was the June-bug; not the 

 plain brown beetle of the northern states, but the beautiful green and gold 

 June-bug of the South— associated in the mind with sultry summer days, and 

 ripe blackberries, on which he feeds. * * * 



I found not only the dismembered wing-covers of the June-bug around the 

 Woodpecker's meat-block, but, in a pit on the splintered top of the stump, I 

 found a live June-bug'. And what a prison he was in! It was a thousand 

 times worse thau the Black Hole of Calcutta. They had turned him on his 

 back and pounded him into a cavity that so exactly fitted him that he could 

 move nothing but his legs, which were plying like weaver's shuttles in the 

 empty air. I always found the June-bugs deposited on their backs, and always 

 alive. 



The red-lieaded woodpecker also shares with the California wood- 

 pecker the provident habit of storing acorns and nuts. Fannie 

 Hardy Eckstorm (1901) says: 



Lately it has been discovered that they not only eat beechnuts all the fall, 

 but store them up for winter use. This time the observation was made in 

 Indiana. There, when the nuts were abundant, the red-heads were seen busily 

 carrying them off. Their accumulations were found in all sorts of places; 

 cavities in old tree-trunks contained nuts by the handful; knot-holes, cracks, 

 crevices, seams in the barns were filled full of nuts. Nuts were tucked into 

 the cracks in fence-posts; they were driven into railroad ties; they were 

 pounded In between the shingles on the roofs ; if a board was sprung out, the 

 space behind it was filled with nuts, and bark or wood was often brought to 

 cover over the gathered store. 



Unlike the California woodpecker, it does not make holes for the 

 reception of the nuts but uses what cavities it can find. Dr. Thomas 

 S. Koberts (1932) says that, on the outskirts of St. Paul, "a red- 

 head spent most of October putting acorns into cracks and climbing- 

 iron holes in a telephone pole and under the shingles of a near-by 

 house. One crack was closely plugged for a distance of twenty feet. 

 When the nuts were too large for the cracks they were split and 

 driven in in pieces." 



George A. Dorsey (1926) tells of an amusing attempt of a young 

 redhead to fill a hole in a telephone pole : 



Finally he found a hole to his liking, and, chattering as he worked, he 

 drove the acorn in Imagine my surprise when I saw a couple of acorns fall 



