THE WOODPECKERS. 145 
alent notion that the sap of trees, in season, supplies 
them with the bulk of their nourishment. We will 
return to this subject again. The ‘“ Hairy” is the 
larger of these two species, being about nine inches 
in length, while the ‘“ Downy” is but little over six 
inches long. So far as my personal observation goes, 
it is not as abundant anywhere as the “ Downy,” and 
wholly absent from many wide tracts within its gen- 
eral range. It is a bird of timber land and not of 
the open country, and shows little disposition to 
accommodate itself to a new order of things. Cut 
down your trees and they will go to some more (to 
them) hospitable region. Wilson speaks of the hairy 
woodpecker as a lover of orchards, but when Wilson 
wrote it was not so long a journey from an orchard 
to a woodland tract. 
But the little downy woodpecker is everywhere. 
There is not a tree too small for it to consider, and 
when trees fail altogether, it will climb over an old 
grape-arbor and be happy in so artificial a surround- 
ing. They come fearlessly into town and visit every 
shade tree in the streets, and have been seen to peck 
at a fly on the wrong side of a window-pane. 
When the warm weather fairly sets in, a pair of 
these little woodpeckers will hollow out a commodi- 
ous nest in a dead tree and rear a brood that seem 
to be hungrier than most babies, considering the 
amount of food the parent birds carry to them. 
Nuttall says,— 
“These birds have a shrill cackle and a reiterated call, which they 
frequently utter while engaged in quest of their prey. In the au- 
tumn they feed on various kinds of berries as well as insects.” 
G k 13 
