34 BY-WAYS AND BIRD-NOTES. 
towards a grain and fruit diet, and it also often 
descends to old logs and fallen boughs for its 
food—a thing never thought of by the ivory- 
bill. As for the rest of the red-headed family, 
they are degenerate species, though lively, 
clever, and exceedingly interesting. What a 
sad dwarf the little downy woodpecker is when 
compared with the ivory-bill! and yet to my 
mind it is clear that Pucus pubescens is the de- 
generate off-shoot from the grand campephilus 
trunk. 
Our red-headed woodpecker (AZ, erythro- 
cephalus) isa genuine American in every sense, 
a plausible, querulous, aggressive, enterpris- 
ing, crafty fellow, who tries every mode of get- 
ting a livelihood, and always with success. He 
is a woodpecker, a nut-eater, a cider-taster, a 
judge of good fruits, a connoisseur of corn, 
wheat, and melons, and an expert fly-catcher as 
well. As if to correspond with his versatility 
of habit, his plumage is divided into four reg- 
ular masses of color. His head and neck are 
crimson, his back, down to secondaries, a 
brilliant black, tinged with green or blue in 
the gloss; then comes a broad girdle of pure 
white, followed by a mass of black at the tail 
and wing-tips. He readily adapts himself to 
the exigencies of civilized life. I prophecy 
that, within less than a hundred years to come, 
he will be making his nest on the ground, in 
hedges or inthe crotches of orchard trees. 
Already he has begun to push his way out into 
our smaller Western prairies, where there is no 
dead timber for him to make his nest-holes in. 
I found a compromise-nest between two fence- 
rails in Illinois, which was probably a fair index 
of the future habit of the red-head. It was 
