552 THE BIRDS OP MANITOBA THOMPSON. 



its food as the other woodpeckers, its bill is less suited for snch work; 

 it is only a summer visitant to the fiir countries (Murray). 



Ou May 31, 1883, fouud a Flicker's uest ia oak stub, only 8 feet high ; 

 the hole was 18 inches deep, but the wood was quite rotten, and I had 

 no difficulty in reaching the eggs. 



Octol)er 27, 1882, while examining an old stump in the woods to the 

 north of Carberry, I met with an excellent illustration of the aptitude of 

 the Spanish name for the woodpecker, " II Oarpentero," as applied to 

 our Flicker. I mean in the sense of its being a worker in wood and 

 house provider for others. The history of the case was briefly this, as 

 far as the circumstantial evidence revealed it: First came the hard- 

 working Flicker and excavated the hole, perhaps while yet the stump 

 was sound, and in the years that followed we know not how many young 

 Flickers cracked their glass-like shells in this narrow chamber; and 

 after the Flickers came no more it was taken by some bird, a grakle 

 perhaps, that, like the "foolish man," founded its nest on mud, finish- 

 ing its superstructure with sticks and straw. Then, it seems, came a 

 new possessor, who built a strong, shapely nest of moss and mud; but 

 for the situation it might have been the work of a robin. Lastly, this 

 many-storied tenement house became the eyrie of a sparrowhawk, whose 

 household furniture of straw and moss reached halfway up to the door- 

 way. A strange tale of a hole, surely ; but there was more yet to be 

 learned from the old stub, and, allowing fullest weight to circumstan- 

 tial evidence and accepting the supposititious as a fact, 1 may be al- 

 lowed to relate as a matter of established history that on a certain day Sir 

 Faleo sparverius brought home to his brood a tiny shrew, of the species 

 yclept by scientists the Sorex cooperi. Now, it chanced that the young 

 hopefuls of the robber baron were not just then very hungry — oh ! mar- 

 velous chance — so that the Sorex cooperi., being left to his own devices, 

 set about to escape, and so far succeeded that he burrowed down 

 through the home effects of the Kestrel and the moss-builder, but when 

 so far the hard mud floor barred further progress, and the poor little 

 captive, weary and wounded, soon died in the buried nest; and there 

 I found him, like Ginevra in the oaken chest, when long afterwards I 

 broke open the rotten timber and made it disclose a tragic tale that, may 

 be, never happened at all. 



In this region (Carberry) the flicker seems to prey principally on ants, 

 taking them sometimes from the rotten stumps that are honeycombed 

 with their galleries, but more often, I believe, from the mound-like ant- 

 hills which are to be seen on the prairie in such numbers. His method 

 of attack seems to be by first pecking a hole in the center of the hill, 

 and then as the ants come swarming out he dispatches them till his ap- 

 petite is satisfied. Afterwards he comes again and again to the hill till 

 it is completely depopulated. « 



On the 27tl) July, 1884, I saw one of these birds (Instiiifj; on a sandy spot near the 

 Assiniboine River. He performed the operation as skillfully as a quail and was evi- 

 dentlv used to it. 



