ECONOMIC VALUE OF OUR BIRDS 59 



He does not wait upon the convenience of the 

 game, but he goes after it, digging, gouging and 

 drilling until the enemy is finally brought to bay, 

 impaled on a tongue that is a living spear of many 

 barbs and dragged forth to its doom. 



It is the woodpecker that stays with us in 

 November and sticks to his job whence all but him 

 have fled. When in midwinter you slowly plow 

 your way through a foot of snow in the silent and 

 desolated woods, and hear overhead the sound of 

 digging and gouging in wood, you know that you 

 are not wholly alone. Watch for falling chips, then 

 look aloft, and you will see a downy or hairy wood- 

 pecker busily working away on an insect-ridden 

 area of tree-trunk, doing work for you and me. 

 When a woodpecker beats a rolling tattoo on the 

 hard outer shell of a dead limb, filling a quarter- 

 mile circle with marvelously rapid sound waves, he 

 is not then digging for insects. He is showing off. 

 He is playing to the galleries, literally, and en- 

 deavoring to attract a mate. When he really 

 works, he wastes no time in theatrical drumming, 

 and you must listen sharply in order to locate him. 



One of the permanent regrets of my life is that 

 nature has not yet produced for the hardwood 

 forests of North America a woodpecker as large 

 as a condor, with a steel-tipped beak that can suc- 

 cessfully drill through and split open the bark of 

 the shell-bark hickory, and bring the hickory-bark 

 borer to justice. 



