72 WINTER NEIGHBORS. 
The only ones of my winter neighbors that actually 
rap at my door are the nut-hatches and woodpeckers, 
and these do not know that itis my door. My retreat 
is covered with the bark of young chestnut-trees, and 
the birds, I suspect, mistake it for a huge stump that 
ought to hold fat grubs (there is not even a book- 
worm inside of it), and their loud rapping often 
makes me think I have a caller indeed. I place frag- 
ments of hickory-nuts in the interstices of the bark, 
and thus attract the nut-hatches; a bone upon my 
window-sill attracts both nut-hatches and the downy 
woodpecker. They peep in curiously through the 
window upon me, pecking away at my bone, too often 
a very poor one. A bone nailed to a tree a few feet 
in front of the window attracts crows as well as lesser 
birds. Even the slate-colored snow-bird, a seed-eater, 
comes and nibbles it occasionally. 
The bird that seems to consider he has the best 
right to the bone both upon the tree and upon the sill 
is the downy woodpecker, my favorite neighbor among 
the winter birds, to whom I will mainly devote the 
remainder of this chapter. His retreat is but a few 
paces from my own, in the decayed limb of an apple- 
tree which he excavated several autumns ago. I say 
“he” because the red plume on the top of his head 
proclaims the sex. It seems not to be generally known 
to our writers upon ornithology that certain of our 
woodpeckers — probably all the winter residents — 
each fall excavate a limb or the trunk of a tree in which 
to pass the winter, and that the cavity is abandoned 
in the spring, probably for a new one in which nidifi- 
cation takes place. So far as I have observed, these 
cavities are drilled out only by the males. Where the 
females take up their quarters I am not so well in 
