WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD 



crickets and big beetles. Their bills are admirably 

 shaped for this sort of work. 



From Canada and the northern tier of the United 

 States the flicker retreats in cold weather, but in 

 the Middle and Southern States he stays the winter 

 through, finding plenty of food. It is in search 

 of the hollow places where insects hide themselves 

 or their eggs that woodpeckers tap upon the trees, 

 judging by the sound whether the wood is hollow 

 or not. But the flicker seems also to drum a great 

 deal as a means of conversation with friends, or 

 just for fun. I suppose these birds must have a 

 recognized code of signals. Bradford Torrey tells, 

 in his Birds in the Bush, how once he noticed 

 two or three flickers clinging to the trunk of a shell- 

 bark hickory : ** One was perhaps fifteen feet above 

 the other, and before each one was a strip of loose 

 bark — a sort of natural drumhead. First, the 

 lower one * beat his music out ' rather softly. Then, 

 as he ceased, and held his head back to listen, 

 the other answered him; and so the dialogue 

 went on." 



In another place the same pleasant writer tells 

 a pretty story of how, "hearing somebody drum- 

 ming on tin," he peeped over the wall to see a flick- 

 er hammering an old tin pan lying in the middle 



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