72 WINTER NEIGHBORS. 



The only ones of my winter neighbors that actually 

 rap at my door are the nut-hatches and woodpeckers, 

 and these do not know that it is my door. My retreat 

 is covered with the bark of young chestnut-trees, and 

 the birds, I suspect, mistake it for a huge stump that 

 ought to hold fat grubs (there is not even a book- 

 worm inside of it), and their loud rapping ofter. 

 makes me think I have a caller indeed. I place frag- 

 ments of hickory-nuts in the interstices of the bark, 

 and thus attract the nut-hatches ; a bone upon my 

 window-sill attracts both nut-hatches and the downy 

 woodpecker. They peep in curiously through the 

 window upon me, pecking away at my bone, too often 

 a very poor one. A bone nailed to a tree a few feet 

 in front of the window attracts crows as well as lesser 

 birds. Even the slate-colored snow-bird, 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 woodpecker, 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 decayed limb of an apple- 

 tree which he excavated 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 out 

 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 nidifi- 

 cation 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 ii> 



