A YEAR IN THE FIELDS 



a few feet in front of the window attracts 

 crows as well as lesser birds. Even the 

 slate-colored snowbird, 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 wood- 

 pecker, my favorite neighbor among the 

 winter birds, to whom I will mainly devote 

 the remainder of this chapter. His retreat 

 is but a few paces from my own, in the de- 

 cayed limb of an apple-tree which he exca- 

 vated 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 

 cavity is abandoned in the spring, probably 

 for a new one in which nidification takes 

 place. So far as I have observed, these 

 cavities are drilled out only by the males. 

 Where the females take up their quarters I 

 am not so well informed, though I suspect 

 that they use the abandoned holes of the 

 males of the previous year. 



24 



