258 Birds of Buzzard's Roost 



white and blue? In flight "with a white gown, a black mantle 

 and a scarlet hood," the red-headed woodpecker is a beautiful 

 bird. His flight is undulating and surging. After two or three 

 strokes of the wings, he almost closes them and then follows 

 the curving wave of his flight. He is an easy bird to identify. 



In appearance the female is like the male. The bill of this 

 woodpecker is light blue, black towards the extremity, and 

 strong; iris of eye dark hazel ; head and neck of the adult, crim- 

 son red all around with a narrow crescent of black on the up- 

 per part of the breast; wings well shaped, bluish-black with 

 secondaries white, tinted with red ; upper part of tail, bluish- 

 black with under coverts white; rump and lower parts of body 

 white; rump and lower parts of body white with reddish tint; 

 legs and feet bluish-green ; claws light blue. During the first 

 season, the head and neck of the young birds are blackish-gray 

 and the white on the wings is spotted with black. 



The red-headed woodpecker is a bird of temperate North 

 America. Its range extends from the southern United States 

 north through the states, and the eastern provinces of the Do- 

 minion of Canada to about latitude 46 degrees ; rare or casual 

 only in the maritime provinces ; in the interior in Manitoba 

 north to about latitude 50 degrees ; west in the United States to the 

 eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains from Montana to Col- 

 orado, western Kansas, the Indian Territory, and the eastern 

 half of Texas. It is an irregular migrant. Those that migrate, 

 go southward the last of October and the first half of Novem- 

 ber and return north very early, if the conditions are favorable. 



The migration of the woodpecker depends very much upon 

 the supply of food, which formerly during the winter months, 

 consisted largely of beechnuts and acorns that had been stored 

 away by it in the knot holes of the trees and the cracks of 

 fence stakes. My brother and I, when we were boys, were re- 

 quired to get in the winter wood from our father's woodland, 

 which was composed largely of sugar maple and beech trees. 

 We seldom felled a tree without examining it to see if there 

 were any knot holes in it which had been taken possession of 

 by the woodpeckers, and usually we were rewarded for our 

 trouble. Often we would get a quart of beechnuts from one of 

 these holes. It was surprising how tightly the beechnuts were 



