Notes on the Birds. 349 
“pletely. The young woodpeckers, those hatched the previous spring, seemed 
to have reached their most voracious age just when the young ears were 
in the condition to suffer most. The damage done the whole country over 
was very great indeed. A little earlier in the fall or summer the Red-heads 
paid their respects to the ripening cherries and the early harvest apples. 
It is probably a very conservative estimate to put their destruction of 
early apples at 10 per cent. 
But we had a very unique way of somewhat lessening their destruction 
of apples. The method may be described as follows: <A long, slender pole 
gray ash was the best), was set firmly in the ground under the apple or 
cherry tree which it was desirous to protect, the pole being long enough to 
project two or three feet above the top of the tree. Woodpeckers coming to 
the tree would almost invariably alight first upon the side of the pole. The 
boy who was “out for woodpeckers” would station himself under the tree 
at the base of the pole where, with a heavy axe or maul in hand, he would 
await the coming of the bird. The foliage of the tree was thick enough to 
prevent the woodpeckers from seeing him, yet not so dense as to prevent the 
boy seeing the upper part of the pole upon which the birds would alight. 
When one arrived and alighted on one side of the pole a smart blow on the 
same side of the pole would knock the breath out of the bird and it would 
fall to the ground where it would be promptly killed, if not already dead. 
In this way it was an easy matter for one person to kill a dozen or more 
woodpeckers in a forenoon. 
Another interesting method by which an occasional woodpecker or 
flicker could be killed was by means of the horsehair snare. These birds 
were in the habit of alighting on the upper end of the stakes of the stake- 
and-rider fences with which most of the fields in those days were sur- 
rounded. With a 2-inch auger, a hole was bored an inch or two inches deep 
on the upper side near the upper end of a stake which woodpeckers had 
been observed to frequent. Two or three grains of corn were placed in the 
bottom of the hole and then a strong horsehair snare was placed around 
the hole so that it was a trifle smaller in one diameter than the hole, yet 
rested upon the wood either at the top and bottom or on the sides of the hole. 
This hair snare or slip-noose was tied to a short stout cord or small wire 
which was firmly fastened to the stake. The woodpecker, alighting on the 
stake, spies the corn and at once puts his head in the hole to get it, but 
on withdrawing his head the horsehair catches under the feathers of his 
neck, draws tight and soon chokes him to death. While this method was 
hardly as sure a thing as the pole and axe, it was nevertheless quite 
effective, albeit not at all humane. 
In those days, the multitude of dead trees in the ‘“deadenings” on the 
farms, to say nothing of the hundreds of acres of primeval forest and open 
woodland, afforded exceptionally favorable nesting sites for the Red-heads 
and the other woodpeckers. These have now almost entirely disappeared 
and with their passing the woodpeckers also have gone, so that now none 
of the woodpeckers is nearly so abundant as they were 30 to 50 years ago. 
Another thing which has had much to do with the decrease in the abun- 
dance of the Red-headed Woodpecker was the destruction of the oak and 
beech forests which produced such a great part of the winter food of these 
birds. One of the pretty sights of the fall months was that of the wood- 
