280 BULLETIN 174, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



upward glide, the trunk is grasped with the feet, and the tail is used 

 as a prop in true woodpecker fashion ; but the flicker is more apt to 

 alight on a horizontal branch than other woodpeckers, when there 

 is less upward glide and an upright posture is assumed, as balance 

 is acquired. 



On the ground, the flicker proceeds slowly by short hops, but some- 

 times it runs rapidly for a few steps and then stops; it seems con- 

 tent to confine its foraging to a rather limited area and does not 

 appear very active. 



Spring drumming on a resonant limb, or inside a nesting cavity, 

 is an essential part of the call to courtship or mating, and perhaps a 

 signal call for other purposes ; but it is used at other times, perhaps 

 for sheer amusement. This habit sometimes becomes a nuisance, 

 since the bird has discovered that the tin roof of a house serves as 

 the best kind of a drum ; here he comes morning after morning while 

 we are enjoying our slumbers, from which we are rudely awakened 

 at an unseemly hour. Mr. DuBois writes to me that, on an afternoon 

 in June, "a flicker was drumming on the lid of a large galvanized 

 iron ash or garbage can at the corner of the back porch of a residence ; 

 he stood on the top of the lid and, at intervals, after looking around, 

 he beat an extremely rapid roll on this metallic drum; the effect was 

 startling." 



As to the roosting habits of flickers. Miss Sherman (1910) writes: 

 "Of all our birds the flickers are the earliest to retire at night, some- 

 times going to their lodgings an hour before sundown, the customary 

 time being about a half hour before sunset. Generally they go out 

 soon after sunrise, but on cool autumn mornings they have been 

 known to linger much longer. During a rainstorm in the middle of 

 the day they have been seen to seek their apartments, also in fine 

 weather they have been found there enjoying the seclusion thus 

 afforded." 



Frank K. Smith, of Hyattsville, Md., sends me the following note, 

 dated February 28, 1936 : "For some nights, a flicker has been roost- 

 ing in the shell of a dead tree, from v/hich one side has decayed 

 away, leaving a troughlike section of its trunk standing. He roosts 

 about 12 feet from the ground. This morning it was cloudy and 

 he left the roosting place at 7 : 25, although official sunrise is at 6 : 37." 

 Mr. Shelley tells me that he flushed a male from the nest tree, "where 

 he clung each night about 3 feet above the nest hole, with the female 

 brooding the young within." Flickers will roost in any open cavity 

 in a tree, or even in a partially sheltered spot on the open trunk; 

 they often drill holes in barns or under the eaves of houses for winter 

 roosts; a favorite winter roosting place is in the sawdust between 

 the double walls of icehouses. Sometimes they dig a hole into a 

 vacant building and fail to find their way out ; I once found one dead 



