186 



BIRDS IN THEIR RELATIONS TO MAN. 



to suit its peculiar habits. The ordinary woodpecker's bill is 

 shaped like a chisel at the tip, but that of a flicker is like a 

 pickaxe. It has the same long, extensile tongue which charac- 

 terizes most of the woodpeckers. This is used for catching 

 small insects, by being thrust out covered with sticky saliva 

 and entangling them. Larger insects are grasped by the bill. 

 Flickers relish fruit as much as robins do. The two species 

 are usually associated when the berries of the sour-gum and 

 black-cherry trees are ripe. In winter flickers eat the berries 

 of Ampelopsis. Nearly half the flickers' diet consists of ants. 



HEAD OF FLICKER. 



In two hundred and thirty stomachs examined at Wash- 

 ington fifty-six per cent, was animal matter, thirty-nine per 

 cent, vegetable, and five per cent, mineral. Two of them 

 contained over three thousand ants each. Other insects were 

 beetles (Cokoptera), bugs (Hemiptera), grasshoppers and 

 crickets (Orthoptera), caterpillars (Lepidoptera), May-flies 

 (Ephemerida), and white ants (Isoptera). In 1 860 a writer in 

 the Southern Planter stated that flickers were the only birds 

 he had ever seen pulling out worms from the roots of peach- 

 trees. — referring evidently to the destructive peach-tree borer. 



The Red-headed Woodpecker is another species that, like 



