THE WOODPECKER. 371 



body of the tree is also disfigured with such numerous and so 

 large excavations, that one can hardly conceive it possible for 

 the whole to be the work of a Woodpecker. With such 

 strength, and an apparatus so powerful, what havoc might 

 he not commit, if numerous, on the most useful of our forest 

 trees ; and yet with all these appearances, and much of vul- 

 ger prejudice against him, it may fairly be questioned whether 

 he is at all injurious ; or, at least, whether his exertions do 

 not contribute most powerfully to the protection of our timber. 

 Examine closely the tree where he has been at work, and 

 you will soon perceive, that it is neither from motives of mis- 

 chief nor amusement that he slices off the bark, or digs his 

 way into the trunk. For the sound and healthy tree is not 

 in the least the object of his attention. The diseased, infest- 

 ed with insects, and hastening to putrefaction, are his favor- 

 ites ; there the deadly crawling enemy have formed a lodge- 

 ment, between the bark and tender wood, to drink up the 

 very vital part of the tree. It is the ravages of these vermin 

 which the intelligent proprietor of the forest deplores, as the 

 sole perpetrators of the destruction of his timber. Would it 

 be believed that the larvae of an insect, or fly, no larger than 

 a grain of rice, should silently, and in one season, destroy 

 some thousand acres of pine-trees, many of them from two to 

 three feet in diameter, and a hundred and fifty feet high ! 

 Yet whoever passes along the high road from Georgetown to 

 Charleston, in South Carolina, about twenty miles from the 

 former place, can have striking and melancholy proofs of this 

 fact. In some places the whole woods, as far as you can see 

 around you, are dead, stripped of the bark, their wintery-look^ 

 ing arms and bare trunks bleaching in the sun, and tumbling 

 in ruins before every blast, presenting a frightful picture of 

 desolation. And yet ignorance and prejudice stubbornly per- 

 sist in directing their indignation against the bird now before 

 us, the constant and mortal enemy of these very vermin, as 

 if the hand that probed the wound, to extract its cause, should 

 be equally detested with that which inflicted it ; or as if the 

 thief-catcher should be confounded with the thief. Until 



