354 A VES ORDER PICIFORMES. 



over the skull. The tongue is furnished with a pointed, horny, barbed tip. 

 This arrangement, so far as is known, obtains in all woodpeckers excepting 

 Sphyropicus and Xenopicus. 



The late Mr. Edward Hargitt divided the family Picidce, at which he 

 laboured unceasingly for fourteen years, into three sub-families, woodpeckers 

 (Picince), piculets (Picumniiice), and wrynecks (lynginat). The latter birds 

 have a soft and mottled plumage like that of a nightjar. They have a long 

 tail, the feathers of which are soft and not pointed like those of the wood- 

 peckers. Three species are resident in Africa, but our common wryneck 

 (I. torquilla) is a migrant to Europe and Northern Asia, wintering in Africa, 

 India, and Southern China. 



The piculets are tiny little birds without the stiffened tail of the wood- 

 pecker, but otherwise resembling them in the form of the bill and the bristles 

 around the nostrils. In the iieo-tropical region the piculets 

 The Piculets. . are represented by the genus Picumnus with thirty-five 



Sub-family species, and Nesoctites with a single species, their place being 



Picumninw. taken in Africa by the genus Verreauxia with one species, V. 

 africana, and in the Himalayas and throughout the Indo- 

 Malayan region by the genus Sasia, which has only three toes. Both the 

 last-named genera have a bare orbital patch round the eye. 



Of the habits of the species of Picumnus very little has been recorded, but 

 Stolzmann says that in Peru he has seen them on the borders of the rivers, 

 tapping the small branches of the trees, and running along the horizontal 

 limbs, sometimes above the branch, sometimes below. 



All the true woodpeckers have the tail spiny, with the shafts of the tail- 

 feathers stiffened. They may be divided into two groups, the feathered- 

 necked section and the narrow-necked section. In the first 

 The True Wood- section are found the ground woodpeckers (Geocolaptes\ the 

 peckers. yellow-winged woodpeckers (Colaptes), and all such forms as 



Sub-family the green woodpeckers (Gecinus) and their allies, the pied 



Picince. woodpeckers (Dendrocopus), the three-toed woodpeckers 



(Picoides), and, in fact, the bulk of the sub-family. The 



narrow-necked woodpeckers are principally tropical, but they inhabit both 



the Old and the New Worlds, being, however, much more plentiful in the 



former, and jbhey are represented in Europe by the great black woodpecker 



(Picus martins). 



The distribution of the woodpeckers is interesting from the following fact, 

 that they are universally distributed over North and South America, the 

 whole of Africa, Europe and Asia, until we approach " Wallace's Line" in 

 the Moluccas, and there we find that a few species extend beyond the limits 

 of the Indo-Malayan sub-region, into Flores and Celebes. In fact, the 

 woodpeckers coincide in distribution with the monkeys, and do not extend 

 beyond the last-named island. 



In habits they are singularly alike, excavating holes in trees, which they 



drill with the utmost precision and with such accuracy that the hole appears 



as if it had been made by the most skilled of carpenters. No 



Woodpeckers, nest is made, and the white eggs are deposited on the chips 

 of wood at the end of the hole, which is often of considerable 

 depth. The note of our green woodpecker, or yaffle, is a resounding laugh, 

 while the pied woodpeckers call to each other by a series of taps on the 

 slender boughs of the tallest trees, their ordinary note being harsh and 

 unmusical. 



