692 



AMERICAN FORESTRY 



Fuertes, who stands, in my estimation, far and away 

 of Audubon as a painter of woodpeckers, not to mention 

 a few other birds, has given us some wonderful portraits 

 of them, and his plate portraying the Red-headed Wood- 

 pecker (adult and immature) with a pair of yellow-bel- 

 lied Sapsuckens is certainly a picture of great beauty 

 and very true to life. I once had alive a specimen of the 

 first-named bird, and I succeeded in obtaining a fine pho- 

 tograph of it w'hich is here seen in Figure lo. It is one 

 of the handsomest birds of our country, with its brilliant 



crimson head and black and 



white plumage, as shown in 

 the figure. Immature birds, 

 which I have likewise pho- 

 tographed, are entirely dif- 

 ferent in plumage as com- 

 pared with the adult ones, 

 the upper parts, including 

 the head, being brownish, 

 streaked with darker tints, 

 the body being otherwise 

 marked with black, gray, 

 and so on. 



Preceding the Red-head in 

 our official list of birds, we 

 have five different kinds of 

 woodpeckers known as Sap- 

 suckers (Fig. 6) and the 

 Pileated Woodpecker with 

 the northern species of it 

 (Fig. 9). The. former are 

 birds with wonderfully 

 beautiful plumage black, 

 white, crimson, red, yellow, 

 and other colors, arranged 

 in most attractive patterns. 

 Space will not admit of my 

 describing any of these in 

 detail ; and to appreciate 

 their beauty the various 

 species must be seen and 

 compared. Their habits are 

 extremely interesting and 

 good accounts of them have 

 been given us by a number 

 of our descriptive ornitholo- 

 gists. These birds puncture 

 various trees and lap up the 

 exuding sap with their 

 hrush-like, short tongues ; and to this extent they are 

 often a harmful factor in our forests, inflicting serious 

 damage to the timber in the Southern States. However, 

 this is offset by the good they do in insect destruction. 



In the same genus with our Red-headed Woodpecker 

 we have the Ant-eating, the California, and the Narrow- 

 fronted woodpeckers. Then, in the next genus there is 

 that splendid species, Lewis' Woodpecker a bird that 

 I had abundant opportunity to study, many years ago, 

 in the Big Horn Mountains, as well as in the scantier 



GOLDEN-WINGED WOODPECKER 



Fig. 13. Young male Flicker shortly after leaving the nest. 

 Photographed from life by the author. Note the black band 

 extending down from the bill. This is red in certain western 

 species, and entirely wanting in the females of the various 

 forms of the genus. A species widely known throughout the 

 country. 



timber that lined the streams in central Wyoming. There 

 is so much black in the plumage of one of them that many 

 know tfhe bird as the "Black Woodpecker" or Che "Crow 

 Woodpecker." It is of a rich red and gray beneath, 

 and an adult specimen has a length of somewhat exceed- 

 ing ten inches. It has some very unusual habits, such as 

 leaving its perch (upon which it sits cross-wise like a 

 robin) and flying out like a flycatcher after insects. 

 It also resorts to the ground to capture ants and various 

 other insects upon which it feeds. It breeds in cavities 



prepared by other birds ; and 

 at certain times the species 

 is gregarious, during which 

 they are noisy. Being so 

 many in one flock, they can 

 be heard for some distance. 

 As a matter of fact, consid- 

 erable space would be re- 

 quired to give an adequate 

 history of this remarkable 

 bird. 



Three handsome wood- 

 peckers, namely the Red- 

 bellied, the Golden-fronted, 

 and the Gila Woodpecker, 

 form the genus Centunis, 

 the first being an eastern 

 species well known to our 

 student of birds (Fig. 11). 

 The other two are western 

 forms, or, in the case of the 

 Golden-fronted, southwest- 

 ern, as its range is in Texas 

 south in to the Valley of 

 Mexico. 



Next in size to the mag- 

 nificent Ivory-bill, we have, 

 throughout eastern United 

 States, another big, black 

 woodpecker, the w i de 1 y 

 known Pileated, which may 

 attain a length of nearly 

 twenty inches (Fig. 9). 

 It is said that it requires as 

 much as a month for a pair 

 of these birds to excavate 

 their nest in a solid tree, the 

 excavation often going to 

 the depth of more than a 

 yard. A writer at hand says that "the food of the 

 Pileated Woodpecker does not interest the farmer or 

 horticulturist, for it is obtained entirely from the forest. 

 The bird does not visit the orchard or the grain field, 

 but all of its work in the forest helps to conserve timber. 

 Its animal food consists probably of beetles and ants 

 and its vegetable food of wild fruits." 



Finally, the list of United States woodpeckers is com- 

 pleted by three species and three subspecies of birds 

 generally known by the name of Flickers, although 



