WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD 



other in.sects lurking in crevices or under the loose 

 bark of such trees as the apple, oak, sycamore, and 

 '" shingly shagbark " ; but his feet are so different 

 from those of his cousins that he finds it easy to 

 perch crosswise on a bough, as few other wood- 

 peckers are able to do. 



The Picus family is a tree-loving clan, so much 

 so that its members disappear to a great extent 

 from a region whose forests have been cut down. 

 Thus the beautiful great ivory-bill is now prob- 

 ably wholly extinct, though formerly it extended 

 all over the Gulf States and lower prairie country, 



Leonhard Stejneger, of the Smithsonian Institution, discuss- 

 ing the subject in the introduction to the ''Birds'* volume 

 of the Standard Natural History, has suggested that the 

 relations of the two species of Colaptes, the Eastern yellow- 

 shafted (C. auratus) and the Western red-shafted (C. tnexi- 

 canus), and their puzzling intermediate forms may possibly 

 be thus explained ; and further suggests that the interme- 

 diate examples of the Lower Mississippi Valley, sometimes 

 called Colaptes hyhridus, having a red crescent and mustache, 

 may be the original stock, which, westward, became modi- 

 fied into mexicanus, eastward into auratus, the isolated in- 

 dividuals with mixed characters being due to atavism, or, 

 in occasional instances, to hybridization. A point which 

 seems to strengthen this view, Dr. Stejneger adds, is the 

 fact that there exists another yellow-shafted species with red 

 mustacial stripe and red nuchal crescent — namely, Colaptes 

 chrysoides. 



321 



