A RED-HEADED FAMILY. 35 
formed by pecking away the inner sides of two 
vertical parallel rails, just above a horizontal 
one, upon which, in a cup of pulverized wood, 
the eggs were laid. This was in the prairie 
country between two vast fields of Indian corn. 
The power of sight exhibited by the red- 
headed woodpecker is quite amazing. I have 
seen the bird, in the early twilight of a summer 
evening, start from the highest spire of a very 
tall tree, and fly a hundred yards straight to an 
insect near the ground. He catches flies on 
the wing with as deft a turn as does the great- 
crested fly-catcher. It is not my purpose to 
offer any ornithological theories, in this pa- 
per; but I cannot help remarking that the far- 
ther a species of woodpecker departs from the 
feeding-habit of the ivory-bill, the more broken 
up are its color-masses, and the more diffused 
or degenerate becomes the typical red tuft on 
the head. The golden-winged woodpecker 
(Colaptes auratus), for instance, feeds much on 
the ground, eating earth-worms, seeds, beeiles, 
etc.; and we find him taking on the colors of 
the ground-birds with a large loss of the char- 
acteristic woodpecker arrangement of plumage 
and color-masses. He looks much more like 
a meadow-lark than like an ivory-bill! The 
red appears in a delicate crescent, barely no- 
ticeable on the back of the head, and its bill 
is slender, curved, and quite unfit for hard 
pecking. On the other hand, the downy 
woodpecker, and the hairy woodpecker, having 
kept well in the line of the typical feeding 
habit, though secking their food in places be- 
neath the notice of their great progenitor, 
have preserved in a marked degree an outline 
of the ivory-bill’s. color-masses, degenerate 
