PIED WOODPECKERS 33 



lime. The insects it touches adhere to it, one and all 

 are drawn into the woodpecker's mouth, and forthwith 

 gathered unto their fathers ! 



The nest is of the usual woodpecker type, that is to 

 say, a cavity in the trunk or a thick branch of a tree, 

 partially, at any rate, excavated by the bird. Although 

 the chisel-like bill of the woodpecker can cut the 

 hardest wood, the bird usually selects for the site of 

 its nest a part of the tree where the internal wood is 

 rotten. This, of course, means less work for the bird. 

 The only hard labour it has then to perform is to cut 

 through the sound external wood a neat, round pas- 

 sage leading to the decayed core. When once this is 

 reached, little further effort is required. 



Last year I spent a few days at Easter in the Hima- 

 layas, and there had leisure to watch a pair of pied 

 woodpeckers at work on their nest. These birds were 

 brown-fronted pied woodpeckers — Dendrocopus auri- 

 ceps. Their nest was being excavated in the trunk of 

 a large rhododendron tree, at a spot some thirty feet 

 from the ground. When I first began to watch the 

 birds the cock was at work. He confined his opera- 

 tions to a spot about four inches from the surface, so 

 that, as he hammered away, his head, neck, and a 

 part of his shoulders disappeared in the hole. His fore 

 toes grasped the inside of the aperture, and his hind 

 toes the bark of the tree. The wood at which he was 

 working was sufficiently hard to cause the taps of his 

 bill to ring out clearly. After I had been watching 

 him for about ten minutes he flew off to a tree hard 

 by and uttered a number of curious low notes. Then 



D 



