1S91.] MaskroucIv oti the Tvoi-y-hillc(1 Woodpecker. 181 



festoons, cast a glooiii and solemnity hard. to realize by one who 

 has never seen it, yet lending a certain grandenr that the student 

 of nature is not slow to appreciate. Scattered through the swamp 

 and giving a tropical air to the whole \\ ere countless palmettoes 

 i^Sabal pabnctto) towering to a height of seventy-five or a hun- 

 dred feet, and it was in a little clump of these that we were t iking 

 our nooning. Suddenly that strange note soinided once, twice, 

 hree times, — approaching nearer with each repetition. It sounded 

 exactl}- like the note of the White-bellied Nuthatcli, only much 

 ouder and stronger, and grasping my gun, I remarked that I was 

 going to kill the biggest Nuthatch on record. Hardly had the 

 words left my lips when, with a bound and a cackle, a magnificen 

 male Ivbrv-bili alighted in the trees directly over oiu^ heads; tor a 

 moment I was too astonished to speak, but in that moment it was 

 joined by its mate, and the two began hammering awav at the 

 palmetto trunks. It was inipossil)le for me to slioot without 

 changing my position, while to move would be to alarm the l)irds ; 

 Jim saw my dilemma and whispered that he could kill them from 

 whei^e he sat, so passing him the gun I watched him take aim. 

 He fired but missed, and the Woodpeckers bounded away into the 

 thickest part of the swamp; hastily snatching the gun I started 

 in pursuit, but failed to find them. Day after day I returned to 

 the same locality in hope of securing them, but without success, 

 and on April 7 I was obliged to leave for home with(nit adding 

 this much coveted species to my collection. 



Mr. Hoxie, who has spent much time in the haunts of the 

 Ivory-bill in Florida, informs me that the Seminole name for it is 

 'Tit-Ka,' and there is a tradition that during a contest of strength 

 it tapped so hard with its bill that the blood and brains flew out 

 of the back of its head. 



In Alabama Gosse * mentions it as not at all rare at Dallas in 

 1859; '" 1S65 it was taken on the west side of the Tombigbee 

 River in Marengo County, and in 1S66 Mr. W. C. Avery shot a 

 female at Millwood on the Black Warrior River, ten miles west 

 of Greensboro. At Crump Springs on the Buttahatchie in the 

 spring of 1SS6 Mr. G. V. Young observed it nesting in a dead 

 pine, some seventy feet from the ground, and in the fall of 1889 

 he identified one in Wilcox County while on a deer hunt. It is 

 rare and seldom seen, but confined to the lower swamp country. 



* Gosse, 'Letters from Alabama,' 1859, 91. 



