WINTER NEIGHBORS. 149 



ally rap at my door are the nut-hatches and wood- 

 peckers, and these do not know that it is my door. 

 My retreat is covered with the bark of young chest- 

 nut-trees, and the birds, I suspect, mistake it for a 

 huge stump that ought to hold fat grubs (there is not 

 * even a book-worm inside of it), and their loud rap- 

 ping often makes me think I have a caller indeed. I 

 place fragments of hickory-nuts in the interstices of 

 the bark, and thus attract the nut-hatches ; a bone 

 upon my window-sill attracts both nut-hatches and the 

 downy woodpecker. They peep in curiously through 

 the window upon me, pecking away at my bone, too 

 often a very poor one. A bone nailed to a tree a 

 few feet in front of the window attracts crows as well 

 as lesser birds. Even the slate-colored snow-bird, a 

 seed-eater, comes and nibbles it occasionally. 



The bird that seems to consider he has the best 

 right to the bone both upon the tree and upon the 

 sill is the downy woodpecker, my favorite neighbor 

 among the winter birds, to whom I will mainly de- 

 vote the remainder of this chapter. His retreat is 

 but a few paces from my own, in the decayed limb 

 of an apple-tree which he excavated several autumns 

 ago. I say " he " because the red plume on the top 

 of his head proclaims the sex. It seems not to be 

 generally known to our writers upon ornithology that 

 certain of our woodpeckers probably all the winter 

 residents each fall excavate a limb or the trunk of 

 a tree in which to pass the winter, and that the cav- 

 ity is abandoned in the spring, probably for a new 



