444 



P I C U S. 



forests which once thickly covered the Grampians 

 and other hills of Scotland, and the quality of the 

 remains of which show how exceedingly valuable the 

 timber of those woods would have been, had it been 

 still remaining to be applied to the purposes of the 

 arts. Not many years ago a large extent of the 

 Hartz in Germany was denuded of its timber by 

 insects in the course of a very short time ; and the 

 labours of those destructive creatures proceed so 

 rapidly, and are so perfectly beyond every means of 

 human care, that the people even of a country which 

 is supported almost exclusively by its timber, would 

 have nothing left but to stand still and mourn 

 the ruin. Nor would it require more than a single 

 season to destroy every pine-tree in the northern 

 zone of the world, if the mischief were not pre- 

 vented by woodpeckers and other insect-feeding 

 birds. 



The insect plagues defy all human prevention and 

 resistance ; and though the individual creatures seem 

 insignificant, their powers are multiplied up, by the 

 countless myriads of their numbers, till they are not 

 only beyond arithmetic, but absolutely beyond con- 

 ception. In their attacks upon a forest, too, espe- 

 cially upon a forest of pines, which do not produce 

 suckers at the roots, but finally perish, when the ter- 

 minal buds are destroyed, the destruction is com- 

 plete ; and not a tree of the same species springs 

 again in the same situation. In building, for many 

 parts of ships, and for various other purposes of the 

 most useful nature, the pine is more valuable than any 

 tree in the forest ; and, therefore, it is impossible not to 

 regard it as a special instance of the Creator's good- 

 ness, that the woodpeckers are specially set to watch 

 over and preserve the pine forests, where the enemy 

 is always in the bud, the cambium, or the newly- 

 formed wood, and not external upon the leaf, or 

 tented up in it so as to be accessible to the slender- 

 billed birds, which take the chief care of* deciduous 

 trees. The bill of no such bird can reach the 

 destroyer in the pine, or in the dead tree, after the 

 bark is gone ; and it is because of this that the beau- 

 tifully constructed and powerful bill of the wood- 

 pecker is brought into requisition. It must not be 

 supposed that the insects in a dead tree are harmless 

 to the forest ; for the fact is exactly the reverse. 

 They pour their myriads upon the living trees till 

 not one is left ; and, therefore, whether the wood- 

 pecker applies himself to one kind of tree or another, 

 his services are always of value. 



The ivory-billed woodpecker is a large bird, as 

 well as a handsome one. Its length is about twenty 

 inches, and the stretch of its wings two feet and a 

 half. The general colour is black, with a delicate 

 reflection of green and greenish purple ; the fore- 

 head is black, but the head is covered with a crest of 

 rich and brilliant red ; there are some white feathers 

 over the nostrils, and the feathers of the crest are 

 also mottled with ash colour, and then white near 

 their bases ; but as these mottlings are not seen, 

 except when the crest is erected, it appears wholly 

 of an intense red, when in a state of repose ; the 

 sides of the neck and the back are marked by two 

 white lines, about an inch apart from each other, and 

 extending nearly to the rump ; the first five quills 

 are wholly black, but part of the secondaries and 

 their coverts are white, and this has procured for the 

 bird the name of the white-backed woodpecker ; the 

 tail is black, and oval at the extremity, by the lateral 



feathers being three inches shorter than the middle 

 ones ; the coverts and shafts of those tail feathers are 

 particularly strong, and the stiff webs turned down- 

 ward, so as to form a hollow on the under side of 

 each. By this means the tail acts with much better 

 effect, in supporting the bird during its labours on the 

 trees. The neck is long, and capable of very posver- 

 ful motion ; and perhaps there is no instrument 

 among the whole feathered race equal to the bill, 

 either in materials or mechanical structure. It is an 

 inch broad at the base ; it tapers in those curves 

 which give the greatest, degree of strength and still- 

 ness combined ; the ridges which strengthen it make 

 it as strong as if it were twice as heavy, and conse- 

 quently twice as fatiguing to the bird ; and the sub- 

 stance of it combines the toughness of horn and the 

 hardness of ivory ; the legs are short, but very stout 

 in the tarsi ; the length is about an inch and a quar- 

 ter, and the outer toe is nearly the same ; the claws 

 are strong, semicircular in their form, and both feet 

 and claws are leaden blue ; the female is rather less 

 than the male, and wants the fine red crest, but in 

 other respects her colours are nearly the same ; the 

 last half inch of the tongue is beset with barbs, and 

 the tip of it is nearly as hard as the bill, so that it 

 can draw larvae out of their holes, much in the same 

 manner as a shot is drawn by means of a ramrod. 

 All woodpeckers have simple membranous stomachs, 

 incapable of reducing hard vegetable matter; and 

 those of all the individuals of this species which 

 Wilson examined, had them well loaded with those 

 large larva, two or three inches in length, whose 

 ravages are so destructive to the trees, especially in 

 the warmer parts of the United State?. 



This, which is by far the most interesting of all the 

 woodpeckers, is not generally distributed indiscri- 

 minately over the United States, but is rather re- 

 stricted to those southerly ones in which insects are 

 so destructive. Virginia is their northern limit on the 

 Atlantic side of the country, though they perhaps 

 range a little farther north in the central vallev. 

 They do not migrate, but remain on the same grounds 

 all the year, nestling in the holes of trees, and laying 

 four or five eggs in a hatch, the young from winch 

 appear about the middle of June. 



The habits of these birds in their breeding places 

 have not been very carefully observed ; and the 

 observation of them is attended with some difficulty 

 and labour, in consequence both of the situations in 

 which they build, and of the places of the nests. In 

 the Carolinas, where they -are understood to be more 

 numerous than in any other part of the United States, 

 they build in the cyder swamps, that is, in those 

 marshes which are so thickly overgrown with the 

 junipers, which are called cyders in North America, 

 that it is impossible so to explore them, as to ascer- 

 tain what they contain, or what goes on in them. 

 Such places are highly pestilent in the warm weather, 

 and therefore few have the hardihood to enter them ; 

 nor is there any doubt that Wilson shortened his life 

 by his zeal in exploring those unwholesome places, as 

 he was only forty-one years of age when the world 

 was deprived of his delightful, and, in some respects, 

 inestimable labours. The nests are made in the thick 

 trunks of the cyders, at a considerable elevation above 

 the marsh ; and it is not necessary that the nesting 

 tree should be absolutely hollow, for the pair of birds 

 working alternately with their powerful bills, can in 

 brief space excavate the solid wood to the extent 



