176 HisiouY or 



or straw ; its eggs are deposited in the hole, without any thing 

 to keep ttiein warm, except the heat of the parent's body. Tiieir 

 number is generally five or six ; always white, oblong, and of a 

 middle size. When the young are excluded, and before they 

 leave the nest, they are adorned with a scailet plumage under 

 the throat, which adds to their beauty. 



In our climate, this bird is contented with such a wainscot 

 habitation as has been described for its young ; but in the warmer 

 regions of Guinea and Brazil, they take a very different method 

 to urotect and hatch their nascent progeny.* A traveller who 



* Wilson, in his American Ornithology, is particularly lively in his de. 

 scription of the various woodpeckers of America. Of the ivory-billed 

 woodpecker he says, " This mn.jestic, and formidable species, in strength 

 and magnitude, stands at the head of the whole class of woodpeckers hitherto 

 discovered. He may be called the king or chief of his tribe j and nature 

 seems to have designed him a distinguished characteristic in the superb car. 

 mine crest and bill of polished ivory with which she has ornamented him. 

 His eye is brilliant and daring ; and his wliole frame so admirably adapted 

 for his mode of lite, and method of procuring subsistence, as to impress on 

 the mind of the examiner the most reverential ideas of the Creator. His 

 manners have also a dignity in them superior to the common herd of wood- 

 peckers. Trees, shrubbery, orchards, rails, fence posts, and old prostrate 

 logs, are alike interesting to those, in their humble and indefatigable search 

 for prey ; but the royal hunter now before us, scorns the humility of such 

 situations, and seeks the most towering trees of the forest; seeming parti- 

 cularly attached to those prodigious cypress swamps, whose crowded giant 

 sons stretch their bare and blasted, or moss-hung arms midway to the skies. 

 In these almost inaccessible recesses, amid ruinous piles of impending tiin. 

 ber, his trumpet-like note and loud strokes resound through the solitary 

 savage «ilds, of which he seems the sole lord and inhabitant. Wherever 

 lie frequents, he leaves numerous monuments of his industry behind him. 

 We there see enormous pine trees with cart-loads of bark lying around their 

 •oots, and chips of the trunk itself in such quantities as to suggest the idea 

 that half a dozen of axe-men had been at work there for the whole morning. 

 The body of the tree is also disfigured with such numerous and so large ex- 

 cavations, that one can hardly conceive it possible for the whole to be the 

 work of a woodpecker. With such strength, and an apparatus so power, 

 ful, what havoc might he not commit, if numerous, on the most useful of 

 our forest trees ! and yet with all these appearances, and much of vulgar 

 prejudice against him, it may fairly be questioned whether he is at all in- 

 iurious; or, at least, whether Ms exertions do not contribute most power- 

 fully to the protection of our timber. Examine closely the tree where he 

 has been at work, and you will soon perceive, that it is neither from mo. 

 lives of mischief nor amusement that he slices oiF the bark, or digs his way 

 •nto the trunk. — For the sound and healthy tree is the least object of his at. 

 tention. The diseased, infested with Insects, and hastening to putrefaction, 

 jue hii favourites; there the deadly crn^^ ling enemy have formed u lodge- 



