The Woodpecker Family 



365 



no "mustache." These marks 

 on the sides of the face of the 

 male are black in the flicker of 

 Eastern North America, but 

 scarlet in one of the flickers 

 of the West. This Western 

 flicker differs also in having 

 little or no red on the neck 

 and golden red on the under 

 side of the wings and tail, so 

 that it is called the " red- 

 shafted flicker." The wings 

 and tail of the Eastern flicker 

 are yellow beneath, so that it 

 is called the " golden- winged 

 woodpecker." Its back is 

 brownish gray, barred with 

 black. 



Flickers subsist largely on 

 ants, getting many of them 

 from the ground. Their beaks 

 are more curved and pointed than the beaks of our 

 other woodpeckers and are not so well adapted to 

 drilling into trees. Like other kinds of woodpeckers, 

 they eat fruit, including the berries of the poison ivy. 



The antics of flickers during courtship are quite amus- 

 ing. For a nest they excavate in a tree trunk or limb a 

 good-sized hole, where the female lays five to nine eggs. 

 The nestlings are fed by a parent thrusting its beak into 

 the throats of the young and pumping in partly digested 

 food from its own stomach. 



Joseph E. Dodson 

 FIG. 224. A house for flickers. 



