106 BIRDS'-NESTS. 



The woodpeckers all build in about the same man- 

 ner, excavating the trunk or branch of a decayed tree 

 and depositing the eggs on the fine fragments of wood 

 at the bottom, of the cavity. Though the nest is not 

 especially an artistic work, — requiring strength rather 

 than skill, — yet the eggs and the young of few other 

 birds are so completely housed from the elements, or 

 protected from their natural enemies — the jays, crows, 

 hawks, and owls. A tree with a natural cavity is never 

 selected, but one which has been dead just long enough 

 to have become soft and brittle throughout. The bird 

 goes in horizontally for a few inches, making a hole 

 perfectly round and smooth and adapted to his size, 

 then turns downward, gradually enlarging the hole, as 

 he proceeds, to the depth of ten, fifteen, twenty inches, 

 according to the softness of the tree and the urgency 

 of the mother-bird to deposit her eggs. While excava- 

 ting, male and female work alternately. After one has 

 been engaged fifteen or twenty minutes, drilling and 

 carrying out chips, it ascends to an upper limb, utters 

 a loud call or two, when its mate soon appears, and, 

 alighting near it on the branch, the pair chatter and ca- 

 ress a moment, then the fresh one enters the cavity and 

 the other flies away. 



A few days since I climbed up to the nest of the 

 downy woodpecker, in the decayed top of a sugar- 

 maple. For better protection against driving rains, 

 the hole, which was rather more than an inch in di- 

 ameter, was made immediately beneath a branch 



