DELAWARE VALLEY ORNITHOLOGICAL CLUB. / 



noted the bird quite regularly among the shellbark hickories 

 and plane-trees in the meadows along Chester Creek near Chey- 

 ney, Pennsylvania, and have seen the young birds practicing 

 short flights during the earlier weeks of summer. In February, 

 1898, I saw it in this locality after an unusually mild winter, 

 which was followed by a spell of abnormally warm weather in 

 March. On the 27th of December, 1901, Stone, Rhoads and 

 myself saw the bird in a piece of open woodland along one of 

 the tide-water creeks below Camden, N. J. The following is 

 from niy note-book under date of March 30, 1901, at North- 

 brook, Chester county, Pennsylvania, on the west branch of the 

 Brandywine: 



"■Red-headed Woodpecker, Obs. , brought what was apparently 

 a small acorn and stuck it into the crevice of a limb and seemed 

 afterward to pound it in." 



This jDarticular bird I watched for some time. It kept con- 

 tinually flying up and down between the ground and the lower 

 limbs of an oak that grew in the meadow, and at intervals vis- 

 ited a tree on the roadside near the spot where I was standing. 

 On one of these visits it brought some object, possibly an acorn 

 picked up in the meadow, and poking it into a crack began 

 pounding it in with sledge-hammer strokes delivered with the 

 force of the whole body, the head being held rigid, while the 

 body moved on the leg joints as a pivot. This fact of the 

 acorn-storing on the part of the Red-headed Woodpecker is 

 interesting in connection with a similar well-known habit of the 

 closely allied Californian Woodpecker. 



I have never observed this species in the heavy timber of the 

 Alleghanies, though I have noted it in the farm lands of moun- 

 tainous districts, as at New Bloomfield, Perry county, Pennsyl- 

 vania, where I once procured a specimen in an orchard in the 

 outskirts of the town. So far as my own observations go, I am 

 led to believe that the Red-headed Woodpecker is distinctly a 

 bird of the agricultural districts where considerable remnants of 

 woodland still exist. That as the farm lands give place to the 

 suburbs in the vicinity of cities, the bird tends more and more 

 to forego its old haunts and ultimately to retire to less populous 

 districts. Its distribution in general must be largely a matter 



