10 IVORY-BILLED WOODPECKER. 



swamps, whose crowded giant sons stretch their bare and blasted, 

 or moss-hung, arms midway to the skies. In these almost inac- 

 cessible recesses, amid ruinous piles of impending timber, his 

 trumpet-like note, and loud strokes, resound through the soli- 

 tary, savage wilds, of which he seems the sole lord and inhabi- 

 tant. Wherever he frequents, he leaves numerous monuments 

 of his industry behind him. We there see enormous pine-trees, 

 with cartloads of bark lying around their roots, and chips of the 

 trunk itself in such quantities, as to suggest the idea that half a 

 dozen of axemen had been at work for the whole morning. 

 The 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 vulgar preju- 

 dice 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 mischief nor amuse- 

 ment 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, infested with insects, and hastening 

 to putrefaction, are his favourites; there the deadly crawling 

 enemy have formed a lodgement, between the bark and ten- 

 der 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 George- 

 town to Charleston, in South Carolina, about twenty miles from 

 the former place, can have striking and melancholy proofs of 



