124 IN BIRD LAND. 
arrived only two or three days before from his winter 
residence in the south. Very likely most wood- 
peckers roost in the cavities which they hew in trees, 
for I do not see why the one into whose private 
affairs I pried that evening should have been an 
exception. He most probably was only following 
the customs of his tribe from time immemorial.? 
A number of experiments made with young birds 
purloined from the nest —I must beg the feathered 
parents’ forgiveness— have added several interesting 
facts to the subject in hand. One spring I became 
guardian, purveyor, and man-of-all-work to a pair of 
young flickers, taken from a cavity in an old apple- 
tree. They were kept in a large cage, in which I 
placed sapling boughs of considerable size. They 
had not become my protégés many days before they 
insisted on converting these upright branches into 
sleeping-couches, clinging to the vertical boles with 
their stout claws, and pillowing their heads in the 
feathers of their backs. In this position they slej-t 
as comfortably as the thrushes and orioles confined 
in other cages slept on their horizontal perches, cr, 
for that matter, as I slept in my own bed. They 
1 The reader will see, from the facts given in the remainder 
of the chapter, that I reckoned without my host in supposing 
that woodpeckers usually sleep in cavities of trees. That they 
sometimes select such places for roosts cannot be doubted; 
but that such is always or even generally their habit the ex- 
periments described farther on conclusively disprove. It is 
only fair to say that the rest of the chapter was added long 
after the foregoing had been written, and proves how unsate 
it is for the naturalist to make generalizations. 
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