98 BEYER, The [vory-billed Woodpecker tn Loutstana. Agu 
timbered with ash, oak and elm. In some of such localities are 
the homes of the Ivory-bills, and from them they do not appear 
to stray very far, in fact, I was assured that the range of a pair 
of these birds does not extend more than a mile from their nest. 
As soon as we approached the vicinity of Big Lake we could 
hear quite frequently the rather plaintiff but loud cry of the ‘ Log- 
god,’ for such the bird is called by those acquainted with it in 
that section of the State. 
The accounts of the habits of this species seem to be consider- 
ably at variance. Audubon, for instance, states that the Ivory- 
bill is never silent, but utters his cry at almost every.moment of 
the day, and then never while on the wing; he furthermore says 
that it never excavates its nest in a dead tree. On the other 
hand the late Captain Bendire quotes from one of his informers 
in his monumental ‘ Life-histories of North American Birds’ 
exactly the opposite. In the paragraphs referred to, Mr. 
Mcllhenny observes that the Ivory-bills are exceedingly silent, 
and that he had never heard them excepting when in flight. 
From the observations made on our hunt after these birds, I 
found Audubon’s statement correct in so far that, if unmolested 
and not alarmed, they are certainly noisy, and by their oft- 
repeated cry we became accustomed to locate them. But when 
Audubon states that they never build in dead or even dying trees, 
he certainly was mistaken, for I took one pair with one of their 
progeny (a young male fairly well feathered) from the nest situ- 
ated in an old and nearly rotten white elm stump, a little over 
forty feet from the ground. The entrance to the nests never 
seems to be as circular as that of other Woodpeckers, but is a 
little wider than high; moreover, this appearance is greatly aug- 
mented by the peculiar and ingenious way of slanting the lower 
edge of the hole for the purpose of shedding the rain, which 
otherwise would occasionally beat in. We found and examined 
several nests, but noticed only one, about twenty-five feet from 
the ground, in a living over-cup oak. The excavation, however, 
was rather small, being only a trifle over nine inches deep and 
eight inches high. We might, in this instance, have doubted the 
identity of the nest but for the fact of finding two body feath- 
ers of an Ivory-bill among the sawdust in the bottom. 
