A RED-HEADED FAMILY. 29 



peared to be, as he braced himself for an ef- 

 fort which was to generate a force sufficient to 

 hurl his heavy head and beak back and forth 

 at a speed of about twenty-eight strokes to 

 the second ! 



All of our woodpeckers, pure and simple 

 that is, all of the species in which the wood- 

 pecker character has been preserved almost 

 unmodified have exceedingly muscular heads 

 and strikingly constricted necks ; their beaks 

 are nearly straight, wedge-shaped, fluted or 

 ribbed on the upper mandible, and their nos- 

 trils are protected by hairy or feathery tufts. 

 Their legs are strangely short in appearance, 

 but are exactly adapted to their need, and their 

 tail-feathers are tipped with stiff points. These 

 features are all fully developed in the Campe- 

 philus printipalis, the bill especially showing a 

 size, strength and symmetrical beauty truly 

 wonderful. 



The stiff pointed tail-feathers of the wood- 

 pecker serve the bird a turn which I have 

 never seen noted by any ornithologist. When 

 the bird must strike a hard blow with its bill, 

 it does not depend solely upon its neck and 

 head ; but, bracing the points of its tail-feath- 

 ers against the tree, and rising to the full 

 length of its short, powerful legs, and drawing 

 back its body, head, and neck to the farthest 

 extent, it dashes its bill home with all the 

 force of its entire bodily weight and muscle. I 

 have seen the . ivory-bill, striking thus, burst 

 off from almost flinty-hard dead trees frag- 

 ments of wood half as large as my hand ; and 

 once in the Cherokee hills of Georgia I watched 

 a pileated woodpecker (Hylotomus pileatus) dig 

 a hole to the very heart of an exceedingly 



