64 THE GREEN WOODPECKER 



though it is a mystery how some of the other species, 

 similarly specialised, can undertake their regular annual 

 migrations in spite of this disability. Dr. Bowdler 

 Sharp has recorded how five young great spotted wood- 

 peckers were brought to him and Mr. Seebohm when in 

 Heligoland. These birds had alighted in an exhausted 

 state in a potato field. 



The characteristic formation of its breast-bone has 

 been an advantage to the yaffle in a way that can 

 hardly have been taken into account when it was 

 planned in Nature's workshop. The resulting shallow- 

 ness of the pectoral muscles those muscles which 

 make the breast of a partridge such delicate fare is 

 the reason why omnivorous man has never admitted 

 the yaffle to his larder; or at least, if he has done 

 so, it is not recorded that the experiment was ever 

 repeated. Even in France, where everything at all 

 edible is turned to immediate use for the table where 

 the native culinary genius is so wonderful that I have 

 eaten a kelt salmon in that land, and enjoyed it too 

 even in France, I say, nobody has ever concocted a 

 palatable dish of piverts. Thus it comes to pass that, 

 though one may travel in France for days in spring, 

 and never hear the gladsome note of blackbird, thrush, 

 or lark, you cannot be long in a French woodland 

 without being greeted by the yaffle's well-known cry. 

 It is as inseparably associated with the oak copsewood, 

 which represents the ancient forests of the Loire, as the 

 tassels of mistletoe are with the roadside poplars. 



Yet another peculiarity of this family must be noted, 



