536 NORTH AMERICAN BIRDS. 



rounded, and with numerous long and soft bristly hairs. This is, of course, 

 very different from the long, extensile, acutely pointed tongue of other 

 Woodpeckers, with its tip armed with a few strong, sharp, short, recurved 

 barbs. 



Dr. Hoy and Dr. Coues maintain that the food of these Woodpeckers con- 

 sists mainly of the camV)ium or soft inner bark of trees, which is cut out 

 in patches sometimes of several inches in extent, and usually producing 

 square holes in the bark, not rounded ones. As may be supposed, such pro- 

 ceedings are very injurious to the trees, and justly call down the vengeance 

 of their proprietors. This diet is varied with insects and fruits, wlien they 

 can be had, but it is believed that cambium is their principal sustenance. 



This strongly marked genus appears to be composed of two sections and 

 three well-defined species ; the first being characterized by having the back 

 variegated with whitish, and the jugulum with a sharply defined crescentic 

 patch of black, though the latter is sometimes concealed by red, when the 

 whole head and neck are of the latter color, and the sharply defined striped 

 pattern of the cephalic regions, seen in the normal plumage, obliterated. 

 Comparing the extreme conditions of plumage to be seen in this type, as in 

 the females of varius and of ruber, the differences appear wide indeed, and 

 few would entertain for a moment a suspicion of their specific identity ; yet 

 upon carefully examining a sufficiently large series of specimens, we find 

 these extremes to be connected by an unbroken transition, and are thus led 

 to view these different conditions as manifestations of a peculiar law princi- 

 pally affecting a certain color, which leads us irresistibly to the conclusion 

 that the group which at first seemed to compose a section of the genus is in 

 reality only an association of forms of specific identity. Beginning with the 

 birds of the Atlantic region {S. varius), we find in tliis series the minimum 

 amount of red ; indeed, many adult females occur wliich lack this color en- 

 tirely, having not only the whole throat white, but the entire pileum glossy- 

 black ; usually, however, the latter is crimson. In adult males from this 

 region the front and crown are always crimson, sharply defined, and bordered 

 laterally and posteriorly Mdth glossy-black ; and below the black occipital 

 band is another of dirty white ; the crimson of the throat is wholly con- 

 fined between the continuous broad, black malar stripes, and there is no 

 tinge of red on the auriculars ; there is a broad, sharply defined stripe of 

 white beginning with the nasal tufts, passing beneath the black loral and 

 auricular stripe, and continuing downward into the yellowish of the abdo- 

 men, giving the large, glossy-black pectoral area a sharply defined outline ; 

 the dirty whitish nuchal band is continued forward beneath tlie black occip- 

 ital crescent to above the middle of the eye. The i)attern just described 

 will be found in ninety-nine out of a hundred specimens from the Eastern 

 Province of North America (also the West Indies and whole of Mexico) ; 

 but a single adult male, from Carlisle, Penn. (No. 12,071, W. M. Baird), has 

 the whitish nuchal band distinctly tinged with red, though difiering in 



