A RED-HEADED FAMILY. 29 
peared to be, as he braced himself for an ef- 
fort which was to generate a force sufficient to 
hurl his heavy head and beak back and forth 
at a speed of about twenty-eight strokes to 
the second ! } 
All of our woodpeckers, pure and simple— 
that is, all of the species in which the wood- 
pecker character has been preserved almost 
unmodified—have exceedingly muscular heads 
and strikingly constricted necks; their beaks 
are nearly straight, wedge-shaped, fluted or 
ribbed on the upper mandible, and their nos- 
trils are protected by hairy or feathery tufts. 
Their legs are strangely short in appearance, 
but are exactly adapted to their need, and their 
tail-feathers are tipped withstiff points. These 
features are all fully deveioped in the Campe- 
philus principals, the bill especially showing a 
size, strength and symmetrical beauty truly 
wonderful. 
The stiff pointed tail-feathers of the wood- 
pecker serve the bird a turn which I have 
never seen noted by any ornithologist. When 
the bird must strike a hard blow with its bill, 
it does not depend solely upon its neck and 
head ; but, bracing the points of its tail-feath- 
ers against the tree, and rising to the full 
length of its short, powerful legs, and drawing 
- back its body, head, and neck to the farthest 
extent, it dashes its bill home with all the 
force of its entire bodily weight and muscle. I 
have seen the ivory-bill, striking thus, burst 
off from almost flinty-hard dead trees _frag- 
ments of wood half as large as my hand; and 
once in the Cherokee hills of Georgia I watched 
a pileated woodpecker (ylotomus pileatus) dig 
a hole to the very heart of an exceedingly 
